DEATH OF A BUTCHER

It is somewhat ironic that Ebrahim Raisi, the “Butcher of Tehran”, met his end in an American helicopter. When the US-made Bell 212 helicopter plummeted into a mountainside in northern Iran on Sunday, it ended the life of one of the greatest criminals in Iranian history. For him, it was a fittingly fiery end to a murderous career.

I’ve been a key supporter of the democratic Iranian opposition movement and a target for the mullahs’ regime for more than 20 years. It sent a registered diplomat – Assadollah Assadi – with instructions to detonate a half-kilo bomb at an opposition rally I attended in Paris in June 2018. Fortunately, Assadi and three co-conspirators were arrested and sentenced to decades of imprisonment as terrorists. Assadi was then disgracefully sent back to a hero’s welcome in Tehran in an outrageous prisoner-swap deal, in exchange for a young Belgian charity worker taken hostage by the mullahs.

Having failed to blow me up in Paris, Raisi’s regime then listed the leaders of In Search of Justice, a Brussels-based NGO which fights for the freedom of the Iranian people, as terrorists. They are Alejo Vidal Quadras, a former European Parliament senior vice-president, Paulo Casaca and myself, both former MEPs and long-time supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran. 

In November last year, a hitman attempted to assassinate Alejo Vidal Quadras near his home in Madrid. He was shot in the face but miraculously survived. All the signs are that the attempted killing was ordered by the mullahs, likely with the full cognisance of Raisi.

As deputy prosecutor in Tehran in 1988, he was one of four individuals whom the then Supreme Leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, appointed to a ‘death commission’ to massacre supporters of the opposition People’s Mojahedin of Iran/Mojahedin-e Khalq. Thirty thousand political prisoners were summarily executed within a few months. 

For his zeal as a merciless executioner, he was promoted to Tehran prosecutor. He later became deputy head of the judiciary, then judiciary chief, paving his way to the presidency as the ultimate, bloodstained hardliner.

Raisi was placed on the US Treasury blacklist in 2019 for serial human rights violations. Since then, as president, he has directed the execution of over 2,000 people, many young protesters detained during the nationwide uprising in 2022/23. Last year alone, Raisi presided over the hanging of 864 men and women, a 48 per cent increase on 2022.

Raisi’s death has plunged the Iranian regime into an unprecedented crisis. Eighty million Iranians are sick of the theocratic regime, their corruption and incompetence, and their squandering the nation’s wealth on foreign proxy-wars and terrorism, turning Iran into an international pariah. The ruling elite’s factional feuding, as they struggle to cling to power, has brought Iran to its knees. 

The Iranian economy has collapsed. The death of Raisi, seen as favourite to succeed the ailing 85-year-old Supreme Leader, will have so destabilised the regime that the rebellious and oppressed young people may now seize the opportunity to overthrow the ruling mullahs.