The 21st session of the court hearing the charges against 104 members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), and also the organization as a legal entity, was held on Tuesday, November 22nd, in the 11th branch of the criminal court of Tehran, presided over by Judge Dehghani. The court advisors, the prosecutor’s representative, the families of the victims and their lawyers, as well as the lawyers of the defendants, appeared in the court.
Judge Dehghani began the hearing by stating that the order to identify and seize all property belonging to the MEK has been issued, and from now on, any transaction which is involved with the property of the defendants or the organization’s legal personality is prohibited by the court and will result in seizure and legal prosecution.
In this meeting, Kazemi, the plaintiff’s lawyer, presented information about the terrorist attack on the Iranian Prime Minister’s office on August 29, 1981. According to him, Masoud Kashmiri, the agent of the MEK in the prime minister’s office, was responsible for the explosion. In this terrorist incident, President Mohammad Ali Rajaee and Mohammad Javad Bahonar, Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran, were killed.
The lawyer said:
“On Sunday August 29th, 1981, when the meeting of the Security Council was supposed to be held and the presence of Mohammad Ali Rajaei as the President and Mohammad Javad Bahonar as the Prime Minister in that meeting was certain, Massoud Kashmiri considered the opportunity suitable for his terrorist act. And an hour before the meeting, after setting the explosion time, he transferred the bag containing the explosives to the Prime Minister’s building and placed it under the table of Mr. Mohammad Javad Bahonar and Rajaei at the headquarters of the meeting.”
He brought up the testimonies of some of the survivors of the incident, family members and friends of Kashmiri that had been filed at the time. Then he asked the son of Mohammad Javad Bahonar, Naser Bahonar to take the stand as a plaintiff and also a witness of the terrorist act.
He said:
“I was present at the scene of the incident, which was on the 8th of Shahrivar 1360, the house was in front of the Prime Minister’s building, and at 3:00 in the afternoon, when I was 15 years old and ready to go to summer school, I heard a huge explosion. I entered the yard, the windows of the building were broken and a very terrible fire had engulfed the entire building, and I, my family, and three other children were watching this disaster, and it took about an hour to an hour and a half for the fire to be contained. Now, as the representative of the family, I am present before the court. we have suffered a lot during these years. As the eldest child, I was 15 years old, my younger sister was 12 years old, the second sister was 7 years old, and the last child was a three-year-old boy. As the victim’s family, we announce our complaint against the crimes that happened in this court.”
Mohammad Reza Goli, former member of the MEK also took the stand as an eye-witness who has met Massoud Kashmiri in the MEK’s headquarters in Iraq. Based on his testimonies, in one of the meetings of MEK commanders, Masoud Rajavi raised called on Kashmiri and introduced him as the operator of the explosion of the Prime Minister’s office. Apparently, Rajavi wanted to block his path so that he would not choose any other place than Iraq, but in the end, Kashmiri went to Germany because, according to Goli, he was not ideologically dependent to the group.
Goli cited from Massoud Rajavi that the explosion was the work of his group. “He clearly said that this was our work, Masoud Rajavi had said in a meeting during after the US list the MEK as a terrorist group,” Goli said. “Massoud said that when we hit the heads of the regime on Shahrivar 8th [August 29th], the US did not designate us as terrorist, but now that we haven’t done anything for about 10 years America has added us to the list.”
The next witness who addressed the court was Massoud Khodabandeh, former member of the group who attended the hearing court via video call from Britain.
To explain his observations about Kashmiri and the explosion of the Prime Minister’s office, Massoud Khodabandeh told the judge:
“I was the MEK’s correspondent in Paris and the person who was our liaison did not even ask us for signatures for passports and such things. When I got my passport in France under the name of Hamid Entezam, Masoud Rajavi’s brother Saleh Rajavi brought it to me quickly. The relationship was so tight. We had a direct link in Paris, and a number of passports and other documents were reserved for us. My documents were under the pseudonym Hamid Entezam. Mehdi Abrishamchi, Maryam Rajavi, Mahvash Sepehri, they all got passports in the same way. None of the IDs are based on their original names.”
Khodabandeh stated, “Massoud Rajavi always used to say in the meetings, ‘We made the regime hopeless, we beat the heads of the regime, so that the regime falls’. During these stages, Massoud Kashmiri himself was in one of these meetings when Rajavi said these words and showed him. He considered these terrorist acts as his honors.”
After Khodabandeh, Saleh Taskhiri, researcher of international law took the stage and said:
“International law obliges the government dealing with these terrorists with the two duties of prosecution and trial or extradition, that is, it rejects the theory of hosting in international law. The Convention on Prevention of Punishment of Crimes Against Internationally Protected Persons, of which Iran is also a member, in Article 1 of this Convention, internationally protected persons are persons, including the head of the country or any member of a group who exercise the duties of the country according to the country’s constitution. Article 2 considers the prohibited acts according to this convention, which include murder, kidnapping, attack against a person or the freedom of a protected person, and in the following articles, states the duties of the states, so that in article 6, the country under the convention that is suspected of committing a crime in They are living in his country, they should pursue or extradite him in accordance with their domestic law.”
The next court session will be held in two weeks.