Reporting by PMOI/MEK
Iran, September 17, 2020—In a letter to the Deputy Attorney General of the Swiss Confederation in Bern, the Vaud Provincial Prosecutor’s Office wrote that the previous decision of the Prosecutor’s Office to close the case of the assassination of Dr. Kazem Rajavi on basis of “statute of limitations” has been revoked, and the case has been transferred to the Attorney General’s Office to be revisited in the context of genocide and crimes against humanity.
In his letter to the Deputy Attorney General of the Swiss Confederation, Vaud’s Prosecutor stated: “It seems that the case of the assassination of Dr. Kazem Rajavi should be considered primarily as exposure and condemnation of genocide and a crime against humanity, and be only considered secondarily as a typical case of murder for a judicial proceeding.”
This argument is based on the fact that the main reason for Dr. Rajavi’s assassination was his extraordinary role in exposing mullahs’ crime of executing 30,000 political prisoners in 1988 and therefore the case is sent to the Swiss Confederate Prosecutor’s Office.
The decision once again indicates that crimes against humanity cannot be subjected to the statute of limitations. Case in point are the perpetrators of crimes against humanity during World War II who are still being prosecuted.
Dr. Kazem Rajavi was the older brother of the Iranian Resistance Leader Massoud Rajavi and Iran’s first ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva after the 1979 revolution. He was assassinated on April 24, 1990, near his home in Geneva by agents of the Iranian regime’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). He was also the representative of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in Switzerland and renowned as a respected human rights defender.
The MOIS agents involved in the assassination of Dr. Rajavi entered Switzerland with diplomatic passports and returned to Iran by a direct flight under diplomatic immunity. The case included undeniable facts and details on the involvement of the regime of Tehran in the assassination and can be considered a blatant example of state-sponsored terrorism abroad.
Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the NCRI’s President-elect welcomed the decision of the Vaud Provincial Prosecutor, and stressed that the perpetrators of crimes against humanity have ruled Iran with impunity for 40 years and that the UN Security Council and Europe must bring them to justice.
The regime has enjoyed more than four decades of impunity in its crimes against humanity and none of the regime’s terrorist acts have been investigated by the international community. Two years after Kazem Rajavi’s assassination, two of his murderers were arrested in France, but the Government of Jacques Chirac extradited them to Iran as part of its policy to appease the mullahs.
Today, the human rights violations of Iran have become highlighted across the world, largely due to the constant activities of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) inside the country and abroad.
The Iranian Resistance will pursue at any costs regime’s crimes and take all efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice.
Background
In June 2020, the Prosecutor for Vaud Province in Switzerland announced the “future closure” of Dr. Rajavi’s file because of the “statute of limitation.” The Iranian Resistance strongly protested this shameful decision, called on the Swiss government to retrace its steps and keep the case open. “The Swiss Government and Judiciary must keep open Prof. Rajavi’s file and international arrest warrants must be issued for those who ordered and perpetrated this terrorist murder,” NCRI’s statement said on June 9, 2020.
The NCRI also emphasized that the regime supreme leader Ali Khamenei; then-ministers of Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Ali Fallahian and Ali Akbar Velayati, and Hassan Rouhani, the incumbent secretary of the Supreme Security Council were the orchestrators of the crime and must be brought to justice.
On Friday, August 21, the U.S. Department of State announced visa restrictions for 14 Iranian individuals for their involvement in gross violations of human rights on behalf of the Iranian regime. The group included 13 officials involved in “a brutal and intricately planned assassination carried out in Switzerland in 1990 as part of Iran’s ongoing worldwide terrorism campaign,” according to a statement on the State Department’s website. “These 13 assassins, who posed as Iranian diplomats, were acting under the highest orders of their government to silence opposition and show that no one is safe from the Iranian regime, no matter where they live. The United States will not stand for the Iranian regime silencing its critics through violence and terror,” the statement reads in part.
Following the designation, Massoud Rajavi said in a message, “In addition to the assassins of my brother, Kazem, the perpetrators and the masterminds of all assassinations and crimes committed inside and outside Iran by the ruling religious fascism must be sanctioned and punished for their actions. They include the assassins of Qassemlou in Vienna, Bakhtiar, and Boroumand in Paris, Fereydoun Farrokhzad in Bonn, Akbar Ghorbani in Istanbul, Sharafkandi in Berlin, Naghdi in Rome, Zahra Rajabi and Ali Moradi in Istanbul, Mohammad Hassan Arbab in Karachi, and dozens of others. These crimes are in addition to hundreds of other terrorist crimes perpetrated by Iran’s ruling theocracy against the Iranian Resistance, the Peshmergas, and our Kurdish brothers in Iraqi territory and Iraqi Kurdistan.”
