Iran continues its terrorist activities in Europe

Islam Mohamed

Despite Europe’s repeated condemnations and demands for a halt to acts of terrorism in Western European countries, Iranian security services continue to operate suspiciously in the cities of the old continent.

An annual German security report revealed that Tehran’s intelligence services continue their activities on German soil and are pursuing and monitoring dissidents.

The report confirmed that Iranian security and intelligence services continue to monitor opposition movements by recruiting agents with German residency or nationality, according to Deutsche Welle.

Iranian intelligence activity

The mullahs’ intelligence also arrests and interrogates people when they travel to Iran for family or professional reasons, seeking to obtain information about dissidents abroad, the report revealed.

It added that the Quds Force, the external wing of the Revolutionary Guards, was involved in intelligence activities in Germany, including monitoring opponents and gathering information about specific facilities and targets.

The report pointed to the arrest of an Iranian diplomat in Germany, Asadullah Asadi, who was working at the Iranian embassy in Vienna. He is currently being tried in Belgium on charges of providing a bomb to two Iranian elements who were planning to blow up the annual conference of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) near Paris on June 30, 2018.

Asadi was arrested on his return to Germany after the explosives were delivered to the suspects. He was handed over to the Belgian government for trial, along with other Iranian intelligence agents implicated in the thwarted terrorist attack.

The report also mentioned that Iranian intelligence has been targeting research institutions and universities in Germany since 2018 with cyber attacks through an Iranian company called the Mabna Institute, which the US placed on the sanctions list in March 2018 due to cyber attacks targeting more than 300 universities around the world.

According to Iranian affairs researcher Mohammed Alaeddin, the mullah regime will not stop its conspiracies, espionage operations against dissidents, assassinations and other terrorist activities, because it is primarily based on terrorism and fiercely fears any opposition movement that could undermine the regime’s false legitimacy and reveal its horrors. Therefore, Iran continues its activities abroad even though these moves hamper relations between Tehran and the Europeans.