Enjoying Khatami's blessing, the Intelligence Ministry has decided to send abroad at least nine of its senior officials involved in the recent spate of killings as dissidents and political asylum seekers so that the Ministry would not be forced to arrest them.
If arrested, these officials' knowledge of the case would implicate the regime's leaders, including Khamenei, Khatami and Rafsanjani, in the recent heinous murders as well as in assassinations carried out in Iran or abroad. Khordad daily yesterday quoted a former Majlis deputy as saying that the Ministry of Intelligence had assassinated at least 120 persons in Iran and abroad in the 1990s.
Since the Intelligence Ministry was eavesdropping on Darioush Forouhar's house, it has recorded the conversations between the murderers and Forouhar, reports from within the clerical regime say. The tape recordings were handed over to Khatami in the first days after Forouhar's murder. Khatami, however, has so far refrained from making these tapes public.
In another development last night, mullah Ruhollah Hosseinian, the Director of the "Center of Documents of the Islamic Revolution," and a member of the Judiciary, told the state-run television that the murderers were among Khatami's supporters. He said: The accused are a number of religious individuals. Politically, they consider themselves to be on the left and are among Mr. Khatami's staunch supporters..."
Commenting on Khatami's positions over the recent murders and his efforts to conceal the true identities of the principals and perpetrators in these crimes, NCR President Massoud Rajavi said: These realities show that as far as human rights abuses and suppression of the Iranian people are concerned, there is no difference whatsoever between Khatami and other factions of this anti-human regime. KhatamiÕs rhetoric about Òcivil societyÓ and the Òrule of lawÓ is only a deception.
Mr. Rajavi added: If Khatami were true to his words, he should have first and foremost dissolved the Intelligence Ministry and the Guards Corps, which are the embodiment of savagery, barbarism and outlaw behavior, and arrested and prosecuted those criminals whose hands are stained with the blood of 120,000 martyrs of the Iranian Resistance.
Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
January 12, 1999
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