A leading Iranian opposition group backed claims yesterday that defector Ahmad Behbahani worked for Iran's intelligence service and that it carried out the 1988 Pan Am airline bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland.

The National Council of Iranian Resistance (NCR) cited its own intelligence from Iran in claiming that Mr. Behbahani had been the Presidential Office's chief of intelligence.

Mr. Behbahani charges that the Pan Am 103 bombing was carried out by Iran, a claim that if proven would cast doubt on the premise behind the effort to convict two Libyan agents now on trial at a Scottish court in the Netherlands….

Michael Rubin, a policy analyst for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said that Mr. Behbahani is known to outsiders as "one of the most important figures in the Iranian terror apparatus."

Mr. Rubin cited a 1996 report from the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group that details Mr. Behbahani's resume in Iranian intelligence.

Under the heading of "How the Murder Machine Works," Mr. Behbahani is listed as the head of the president's intelligence service.

"It is run by Ahmad Behbahani, a relative of [former President Ali-Akbar Hashemi] Rafsanjani, and it designates targets for assassination," said the report.

According to the NCR, Mr. Behbahani was responsible for the assassinations of:

• Abulraham Qassemlou, leader of Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran in 1988 in Vienna.

• Kazem Rajavi, a human rights advocate murdered in Geneva in 1990.

• Former Iranian Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar, who was killed in Paris in 1991.

The NCR also blamed Mr. Behbahani for the killings of a number of lesser-known dissidents.

In the "60 Minutes" report, Mr. Behbahani claimed Iranian responsibility for the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 90 persons and the June 25, 1996, bombing of the U.S. military barracks in Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia, that killed 19 American servicemen….

The NCR yesterday said its sources inside Iranian intelligence confirmed the identity of the man in Turkey as Mr. Behbahani….

According to the NCR, which first announced Mr. Behbahani's defection May 24, the explosives for the bomb were transferred through the Frankfurt, Germany, airport by members of Iranian intelligence posing a Iran Air workers….
 

Iran Expert Believes Iran Planned Lockerbie, Reuters, June 7

CAMP ZEIST, Netherlands - A British Iran expert said Wednesday he trusted a report that Iran rather than Libya planned the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing, saying the Iranian dissident making the claim had been involved in international terrorism.

British peer Lord Avebury told Reuters in a telephone interview from London that a parliamentary report he wrote in 1996 named Behbahani as an Iranian official responsible for international terrorism.

"He was at that time an official in (Akbar Hashemi) Rafsanjani's office, when Rafsanjani was president, who was responsible for links with the Ministry of Intelligence in planning and carrying out (attacks)," he said.

"I thought they'd been very careful in the phraseology of the denial. In fact he worked in Rafsanjani's office and not in the Ministry of Intelligence, so what they are saying is not technically a lie," he said.
 

New Turkish President Rejects Iranian Invitation, Reuters, June 7

ANKARA - Turkey's newly inaugurated President Ahmet Necdet Sezer has rejected an invitation to attend an international economic meeting in Tehran, the NTV television channel said on Wednesday.

Relations between officially secularist Turkey and Islamic Iran are often tense but have worsened recently amid Turkish media accusations that there were Iranian links to political killings in Turkey.

Turkey's intelligence service announced on Monday that it was questioning an Iranian man who said he was a defecting Iranian spy with information on Iranian involvement in what it called "terrorist attacks" abroad.

NTV said Sezer had rejected an Iranian invitation to attend a meeting of the Economic Cooperation Organization in Tehran next week. Iran's deputy foreign minister visited Ankara on Monday to give Sezer a formal invitation to the talks.
 

Student Leader Arrested, Agence France Presse, June 6

TEHRAN - Mahmud Shushtari, secretary of Tehran University's Islamic Students Association, was arrested Tuesday by the university security service and handed over to the intelligence ministry, the association said.

It reported in a statement that the ministry had drawn up an arrest list of 14 members of the group, of whom four had so far been detained.

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