ALLEGED IRANIAN INTELLIGENCE OFFICER SENTENCED TO 17 YEARS IN PARIS
PARIS 23 June (IPS) Mr. Ahmad Jeyhooni, a high-ranking member of the Iranian intelligence services was sentenced Friday to seventeen years jail by a Paris criminal court for "association in the murder of Dr. Reza Mazlooman" an Iranian political activist killed on 27 May 1966.
Asking for 30 years imprisonment, the Prosecutor said the verdict was a warning to the Islamic Republic that dialogue among civilisations apart, France would not tolerate political assassination in its national territory.
By "dialogue among civilisations", the Prosecutor was referring to the Iranian President’s pet project that was also approved by the United Nations.
The trial of Mr. Jayhooni, an Iranian who lives in Bad Godesberg, a posh residential area of Federal Germany’s former Capital Bonn, where he had set a video shop, had started Monday, five years after Dr, Mazlooman was found dead in his tiny apartment in a Paris suburb, shot at close range by three bullets.
Mr. Jayhooni was arrested two days latter in his residence by German police on request from Judge Jean Louis Bruguiere, a top French anti-terrorist investigator, charging that the man was involved in the murder, being one of the last people who had visited the victim.
Mr. Bruguiere, and well-informed Iranian sources had indicated that Mr. Jayhooni was in fact a high-ranking operative working closely with Iranian secret services in Germany, using his shop as a cover for Iranian agents hunting Iranian dissidents in Europe.
However, Judge Bruguiere admitted that he could not establish that Mr. Jayhooni was the killer, as a radar camera for excess speed had spotted him during the night of the crime.
Pointing to the alleged terrorist’s contradictory statements, the Prosecutor observed that while Mr. Jayhooni claims that he was apolitical, yet he would keep close relationship with a great number of influential Iranian political dissident personalities, including the victim, proposing financial and technical assistance for their activities against the Islamic Republic.
"While Mr. Jayhooni would persistently claims that he was sought after by Iranian authorities, yet he would often travel to Iran, have regular contacts with Intelligence Ministry agents in Germany, as evidenced by both German intelligence agency and France’s anti-espionage organisation", the Prosecutor further said.
A former Deputy Education Minister under the Shah and a respected university professor, Dr. Mazlooman was also the number two man in the "Derafsh Kavian", a US-funded but Paris-based organisation led by Dr. Manoochehr Ganji, Mr. Mazlooman’s boss at the Ministry.
Ever since his arrival in the France in early eighties, Dr. Mazlooman took the name of Koorosh Aryamanesh and founded the "Payam Ma Azadegan" (The Message of We, Freemen", a staunchly anti-Islamic weekly publication that could well be the reason for which the ruling Iranian ayatollahs had ordered his physical elimination, according to Iranian observers, some of them his best friends.
Noting that Mr. Jayhooni would use the methods employed at the time by Iranian secret services to eliminate opponents by befriending with the victims, win their total confidence and infiltrate their organisations, the Prosecutor then described the accused as a "Trojan Horse" to introduce the killer in Mr. Mazlooman’s apartment.
Actually, friendship between the victim and his killer started after Mr. Jayhooni offered Mr. Mazlooman to distribute his publication in Germany and offered financial assistance.
Requiring from the five magistrates thirty years imprisonment for Mr. Jayhooni, the Prosecutor said the sentence should serve as a warning to those who ordered the assassination that France, the land of human rights, could not tolerate such terrorist operations on its geographical boundaries.
Iranian observers said the sentence against Mr. Jayhooni was in sharp contrast with the way France’s justice behaved in dealing with other Iranian killers in the eighties, letting them free, yielding shamelessly and unscrupulously to blackmails and threat of waging terrorist operations against France and French citizens on both the French soil and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Dr. Ganji praised the independence showed by France’s Justice and the Court’s interest in reaching the truth.
"In fact, this was the trial of the Islamic Republic", he told the Persian service of Radio France Internationale, adding that Mr. Jayhooni would insist time and again to meet him personally, offering to become a member of Derafsh Kaviani.
Alongside the "Derafsh Kavian" and some other groups, the French Association "SOS-Attentats" but more remarkably the Paris-based "Reporter Sans Frontieres" (Reporters Without Borders) have registered plaintiffs.
"One has murdered cowardly an Iranian journalist in a foreign land five years ago. Therefore, it is natural for our organisation to register as a plaintiff in the trial of the killer’s alledged associate", the RSF said in a communiqué released Monday in Paris, explaining that the aim of the action was "the identification and punishment" of those who ordered the assassination, as, in the past, the French Justice had not been spared from diplomatic pressures in terrorist affairs related to Iran"
This is the first time that RSF has decided to move from "protest" (to authorities that repress freedom of the press) and assisting (the victims) to the stage of "intervening in justice", explained Mr. Robert Menard, the organisation’s General Secretary.
"What justifies this new approach is the impunity of the murderers", he said, observing that "out of the 750 journalists who had been assassinated in the world in the past fifteen years, 95 per cent of the cases, of the assassinations, have not been concluded, the killers remaining unpunished, with some cases where the murderers not even being sought".
Iranian analysts said after the condemnation of all Iranian clerical leadership, including the present leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenehe'i and Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, by a Berlin High Court in April 1997 investigating the murder of four leaders of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan in Berlin in September 1992, this was the second time that the ruling Iranian theocracy would be condemned "by proxy".
Mr. Jayhooni’s lawyer contested the verdict, said the accusations were baseless and the case empty of substance.
Based on declarations from his client, he named a certain Mazaheri as the murderer adding that if Mr. Jayhooni and another co-defendant wanted to kill Mr. Mazlooman, they could have done it in the streets, using masks and hoods.
For his part, and reading from a text in French, Mr. Jayhooni regretted the murder of Mr. Mazlooman, whom he recalled as a good and trusted friend.
But the Prosecutor rejected his claims, exhibiting pictures showing Mr. Jayhooni with Mr. Morteza Gholami, the Head of Iranian Intelligence Ministry’s "antenna" in Federal Germany.
On Mr. Jayhooni’s request, his lawyer called for an immediate appeal. ENDS JAYHOONI SENTENCED 23601