Copies of this letter were sent to Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, and the press.
Mehrdad Kavosi was imprisoned 10 years by the Khomeini regime, before he fled to Turkey last year. After several months in Turkey, while his asylum in Sweden was being processed, the Turkish police handed Mr. Kavosi over to the Khomeini regime in March 1996. Mr. Kavosi was immediately detained by the Intelligence Ministry and subjected to vicious pressure. Due to extensive international activities to save Mr. Kavosi's life, the Khomeini regime was forced to release him and agree to his departure from the country.
In his letter to Prof. Copithorne, Mr. Kavosi wrote that the regime's ultimate goal in pressuring him during his detention was "to take advantage of me for propaganda purposes" and "to force me to have an interview against the People's Mojahedin Organization and the National Council of Resistance of Iran."
Mr. Kavosi adds in his letter that the Intelligence Ministry forced him to write a letter to Prof. Copithorne and falsely claim that his wife was detained in the Mojahedin's prisons in Iraq. "In Turkey, my wife and I volunteered to join the National Liberation Army of Iran. Since my wife had a passport and legal travel documents, they could send her to the NLA. However, I had to stay in Turkey because I did not have the proper papers."
He also wrote: "To obtain the abovementioned letter, the regime's agents put me under very intense psychological pressure and threats... Threat to execution ...Threat to long-term imprisonment and torture, ... "
In another shocking part of his letter, Mr. Kavosi explains: "At Mehrabad airport, they filmed the process of my departure. They instructed me [to] give a copy of the letter to the U.N. representative, before the camera... Upon arrival in Turkey, employees of the Iranian embassy in Istanbul were waiting for me. They took me to Ankara, under guard. They took me to a hotel...
"The next condition was that I fax in their presence the above mentioned letter to [Prof. Copithorne's] office in Geneva, Amnesty International and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Turkey. They had emphasized that it is only then that I can receive my passport which they were holding."
Frustrated in its effort to whitewash its own image, the mullahs' regime has found the only solution in tarnishing the image of the just Resistance of the Iranian people. The conspiracy against Mehrdad Kavosi, just like the conspiracy against the prominent Iranian opera singer Mohammad Taghaddossi, is another irrefutable testament to the mullahs' use of inhuman methods to turn the human rights against the Iranian Resistance. It shows that the source of allegations such as torture and imprisonment of dissidents by the Mojahedin is no one but the Khomeini regime and its terror machine.
Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran - Paris
July 31, 1996
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