LONDON—A British MP who escaped death when an Iranian diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, was intercepted before he could bomb a rally of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in Paris in 2018 has described it as “worrying” that Belgium was considering swapping Assadi for a Belgian citizen in an Iranian jail.
Bob Blackman, a Conservative MP, told a conference at the Houses of Parliament in London on Monday it was a “shocking development” for Belgium to consider swapping Vandecasteele for Assadi, who was jailed for 20 years in Antwerp in February 2021 for plotting a bomb attack against the rally, which was attended by several British MPs as well as U.S. and European politicians.
Blackman said the bomb had been smuggled into Belgium in an Iranian diplomatic pouch and he said that if Assadi was sent back to Iran he would be “treated as a hero” by the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
He said if Assadi had succeeded and killed NCRI leader Maryam Rajavi or Western politicians who support the opposition to the government in Tehran, “there would have been a war and the Iranian regime would have been obliterated by the U.S.”
Blackman said Britain and the European Union should have taken much tougher action after Assadi’s conviction and he said of the regime in Tehran: “They suppress their people and they execute their enemies. We must treat them accordingly.”
Blackman then quoted Winston Churchill, who once said, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”
The MP said the British government should proscribe the Revolutionary Guards in Iran just like they had Hamas and Hezbollah.
Blackman said: “We’ve proscribed the children—Hamas and Hezbollah—but not the parent, who has been supplying them with funding and resources. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Iranian Embassy ‘Houses Murderers and Terrorists’
She said: “It doesn’t house diplomats. It houses murderers and terrorists and poses a direct threat to our democracy and way of life. We should shut it down and expel the diplomats and their families.”Zabeti called for more action from Western governments to support the Iranian people’s “uprising,” but she warned: “It’s not for anyone in the exile community to hijack their revolution. The voice of the Iranian people has been loud and our voice is to be their voice.”
She also said it was an “insult” to the Iranian people to suggest they were demonstrating in order to restore the son of the last shah to his throne.
“They deserve far better than the choice between two dictators or the lesser of two evils,” Zabeti added.
The conference, which was hosted by the NCRI, was told 750 people, including 43 children, had been killed during the recent protests in Iran and around 30,000 had been locked up, many of whom had been tortured and sexually assaulted.
David Jones, another Conservative MP, said, “What we are witnessing in Iran may have come as a surprise to many but not to those of us who taken an interest in events in Iran over the years.”
West’s Iran Policy ‘Based on an Illusion’
Jones said the West’s current policy towards Iran was “based on an illusion that by accommodating this regime they can reach a solution to the nuclear threat.”He said: “This is the wrong approach. The Iranian government only responds to firmness and resolve.”
Jones said the NCRI had worked hard to expose the “malign activities” of the Iranian regime, and was the first to disclose its secret nuclear programme.
Hossein Abedini, the NCRI’s deputy director in the UK, said the regime in Tehran had been responsible for hundreds of terrorist attacks over the years, including the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut in 1983 which killed more than 300 people, and a 1994 bomb in Buenos Aires which killed 85 people at a Jewish community centre.
Abedini said Iran had the fourth biggest oil reserves in the world and the second biggest gas reserves and he said they did not need nuclear energy, but “the mullahs needed a bomb.”
He said: “Iran has been like a volcano which has been simmering for decades. The volcano finally erupted and it will not return to the past. The Iranian people have cut off all relations with the regime and it’s time for Western governments to cut off relations with this dictatorship too.”
One of the principal constituents of the NCRI is the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran, or Mojahedin-e-Khalq, which was originally a left-wing Soviet-backed group and was later supported by Saddam Hussein, but now supports the NCRI’s aims of multi-party democracy and a “market economy.”
