TEHRAN – A senior Iranian human rights official warned Europe on Friday that its support for the anti-Iranian terror organization Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MKO) will backfire, as will the terror group Daesh.

Kazem Gharibabadi, deputy head of the judiciary for international affairs and secretary of the High Council for Human Rights, censured the European Parliament for supporting MKO members by calling them “political opponents”.

It is shameful for members of the European Parliament to pursue their own political interests and turn a blind eye to the crimes committed by the MKO, which has killed more than 12,000 innocent Iranians and continues its terrorist activities while traveling freely through the European countries, he said. .

“Europeans should know that as their support for Daesh backfired in such a way that more than 4,000 Daesh members were European citizens and created insecurity for them, their support for the MKO will be also costly,” warned the Iranian human rights chief. , reported Press TV.

Gharibabadi said the United States and Europe have committed the most heinous crimes against Iran by supporting terrorist groups, harboring them and delisting them as terrorist groups as well as imposing or enforcing illegal and oppressive sanctions.

“The European Parliament and European countries must answer for their human rights violations against Iranians. They are not able to preach to others on human rights,” the senior human rights official said.

After its founding more than 50 years ago, the MKO launched a campaign of bombings and assassinations in Iran. Of the nearly 17,000 Iranians killed in terrorist attacks over the past four decades, around 12,000 were victims of the group’s terrorist acts.

In a November 2018 report, the British Guardian newspaper reported that Saddam Hussein, who was waging a bloody war against Iran with the support of the United Kingdom and the United States, saw an opportunity to deploy the MKO fighters against the Islamic republic. In 1986, he offered the group arms, money and a large military base called Camp Ashraf, just 80 km from the border with Iran.

For nearly two decades, under their embittered leader Massoud Rajavi, the MKO staged attacks on civilian and military targets across the Iranian border and helped Saddam suppress his own domestic enemies. But after siding with Saddam – who indiscriminately bombed Iranian cities and regularly used chemical weapons in a war that cost millions of lives – the MKO lost almost all the support it had. preserved in Iran. The members were now widely considered traitors.

For most of its life in exile, the MKO was funded by Saddam. After its fall, the group claims to have raised funds from Iranian diaspora organizations and individual donors. The MKO has always denied being funded by Saudi Arabia – but Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former director of the Saudi intelligence agency, made waves when he attended the group’s 2016 rally in Paris and called for the fall of the Iranian government.

“The money is definitely coming from the Saudis,” says Ervand Abrahamian, a professor at the City University of New York and author of the definitive academic work on the group’s history, The Iranian Mojahedin. “There is no one else who could subsidize them with this level of funding.”

After the US invasion of Iraq, it launched a lavish lobbying campaign to rescind its designation as a terrorist organization – despite reports implicating the group in assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists as recently as 2012, a said the Guardian.

Rajavi has not been seen since 2003 – most analysts assume he is dead – but under the leadership of his wife, Maryam Rajavi, the MEK has won considerable support from sections of the American and European right, eager to allies in the fight against Tehran.

The cult group is currently based in Albania, where it enjoys freedom of activity after being delisted by the European Union and the United States in 2009 and 2012, respectively.

Regardless of its disrepute in the world, the MKO has organized many big events in recent years, attended by senior US, Israeli and Saudi officials, including former US Senator John McCain, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the former US national security adviser. John Bolton, former US Senator Joe Lieberman and Turki bin Faisal Al Saud.

Bolton, who has made several appearances at events supporting the group, reportedly received more than $180,000. According to financial disclosure forms, Bolton was paid $40,000 for a single appearance at the Free Iran rally in Paris in 2017.

An Albanian historian and journalist said in a tweet on Thursday that the country’s police had alerted the US Embassy that MKO members were involved in various criminal activities in Europe, including human trafficking, with links possible with Daesh.

Olsi Jazexhi, citing Albanian media reports, said that some MKO operatives, led by terror group leader Maryam Rajavi and based in a camp near the capital Tirana, tried to smuggle more than 400 members of the group to France.

“Politically motivated”

Gharibabadi also denounced a recent European Parliament resolution on the death penalty in Iran, saying it is based on political goals and does not represent existing realities in the country.

“This resolution encompasses distorted and fabricated issues and is not compatible with existing realities in Iran, but it was prepared with completely political objectives.”

The official said the penalty of execution is applied in 55 countries around the world and urged the European Parliament and European countries to respect other nations’ human rights laws and cultural diversity.

Under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the death penalty is permitted when it comes to capital crimes, he said, criticizing Europeans for imposing their own standards on other countries in contradiction with their sovereignty.

Europeans must learn to respect the national sovereignty of other countries and know that they cannot support their criminal citizens and demand their release through threats, the Iranian official said.