About one hundred Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) members have entered the United Arab Emirates to spy on Iranian nationals, a report says.
The MKO members have arrived in the country and are working closely with the UAE Security Forces and the US Central intelligence Agency (CIA), Nahrainnet news website quoted informed sources.
The terrorist agents are stationed inside the UAE in a bid to carry espionage operations against the Iranian embassy staff, Iranian businessmen, laborers and tourists, Nahrainnet added.
Based on the report, the CIA officers who have already set up a regional center in Dubai have collaborated with UAE security forces to bring in the MKO agents.
It is not known when the MKO members launched the operation in the UAE, but it is understood that they have moved to the country from Iraq, Jordan and some European countries.
The Mujahedin Khalq Organization, which identifies itself as a Marxist-Islamist guerilla army, was founded in Iran in the 1960s.
The terror group was exiled twenty years later for carrying out numerous acts of terrorism in the country and targeting Iranian government officials and civilians within the country and abroad.
Outlawed in Iran, the group was relocated in France before being expelled at the order of the then-prime minister Jacques Chirac. The organization, eventually, moved to Iraq, where it allegedly assisted former dictator Saddam Hussein in the massacre of thousands of Iraqi civilians in the 1990s.
Many countries including the US have blacklisted the MKO as a”terrorist”organization. The US State Department says that the MKO assassinated at least six US citizens in Iran, prior to the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
This is while earlier in January, the 27-nation European Union ruled against the MKO’s seven-year inclusion in the blacklist. The ruling is widely believed to be politically motivated and the result of legal developments combined with intense lobbying by the terrorist group.
The Mujahedin Khalq Organization is blacklisted by many countries, including the United States as a terrorist organization. It relocated to Camp Ashraf from Iran after the Islamic Revolution.
The presence of Mujahedin Khalq Organization members at Camp Ashraf was not only due to the approval and support of Saddam; it was also welcomed by some leading Arab states, according to Nahrainnet.
The Iraqi parliament has called on the government to block the MKO’s main headquarter known as Camp Ashraf and expel its members from the Iraqi soil, but some members evade leaving the camp.
The Iraqi government says the MKO has played a significant role in destabilizing the war-torn country, blaming the group for terrorist attacks within Iraq.