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At least two senior Intelligence Ministry agents, Mohammad Sharifzadeh (aka Mohammadi), director general for the Intelligence Ministry's internal security directorate, and Senobari, director general for personnel control, were directly involved in the recent killings, reports received from Iran say.
Fearing the exposure of other crimes perpetrated by the Ministry, however, Khatami has prevented the arrest of these two individuals and a number of other senior officials and only authorized the arrest of 25 individuals who are mostly among the Ministry's low-ranking personnel.
To this end, immediately after the Ministry issued a statement, Khatami sent a message to the torturers and henchmen in the Ministry, describing them as "selfless, dignified and honorable," "the most honest and loyal force" and "the source of service and creators of great epics."
According to reports from Iran, a supreme
committee, consisting of mullahs' leader Ali Khamenei, Khatami, ex-President
Hashemi Rafsanjani, Intelligence Minister Ghorban-Ali Dorri Najafabadi,
his predecessor Ali Fallahian, Revolutionary Guards Corps Commandant General
Rahim Safavi, GC Chief of Staff Mohammad-Baqer Zolqadr and former deputy
to the Intelligence Minister Hejazi, has been informed fully of these murders
or supervised the killings.
Mullahs' Leader Still Says Foreigners Behind Killings, Reuters, January 8
TEHRAN - Iran's supreme leader on Friday accused foreign elements of being behind a recent spate of killing of dissident intellectuals, saying members of the intelligence service could not have acted alone.
"I cannot believe that these murders have happened without a foreign scenario...These murders aimed to damage the system and the government," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said.
Khamenei told a Friday prayers gathering at the Tehran University campus that those who were killed posed no threat to the Islamic republic.
"Mr. Forouhar was our prison-mate before the revolution, he became our colleague after the revolution, and later turned into our enemy. But he was a harmless enemy...He had too little influence to be any threat to the Iranian government," he said.
The senior Shi'ite cleric criticized newspapers that have urged conservative Intelligence Minister Qorbanali Dorri Najafabadi to resign.
"Propaganda against the Intelligence
Ministry is extremely unfair... I call on (intelligence forces) not to
lose their morale and to continue to defend the nation," he said.
Frightening Reassurances in Iran, The New York Times, January 10
... Iran ... is a country that never was accustomed to revealing its secrets, whether its leader wore a turban or a crown.
So last week's official admission that a death squad operating inside its secretive intelligence service was responsible for a series of killings of the regime's critics was startling, to say the least.
By American standards, the statement from a spokesman (unnamed) of the Ministry of Information (as it is called) did not reveal all that much. It did not identify the "irresponsible, misguided and unruly personnel" who it said had been arrested. It did not say who ordered the murders. It did not promise a wholesale purge of the super-secret ministry, which is believed to have carried out scores of assassinations abroad, sanctioned rogue operations and is larger and more intrusive in the lives of its own citizenry than its predecessor, SAVAK, the shah's secret police.
But why, after all, should anyone have expected a full and frank explanation? Mysterious disappearances, fatal heart attacks in prison and outright murders have long been part of the political landscape of Iran's Islamic Republic.
In 1994, for example, after 134 members of a writers' association signed a letter calling for an end to censorship in Iran, five of the signatories were killed or died soon afterward in suspicious circumstances. The next summer, the driver of a bus carrying 30 members of the group to a poetry conference in Armenia twice tried to run the bus off a mountain, both times jumping out of the bus to save himself first. Both times a passenger grabbed the wheel and steered the bus back onto the road.
What is unclear, however, is just how much reassurance this semi-openness has provided for the writers and others who have come to fear for their lives.
After the Ministry of Information's announcement that it had uncovered rogues in its ranks, Khatami made it sound as if the committee had finished its work and the case was closed. "What happened in recent days shows that the Ministry of Intelligence is alert and alive and its strong body has the capability to eradicate fast and forcefully any sick cell or strange limb that might appear," he said.