Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) commander, General Hossein Salami, was at the center of a rare criminal complaint filed with Paris prosecutors Thursday.
AFP reports Salami along with Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib and Al-Quds force chief Esmail Qaani were all accused of “death threats and justifying terrorism,” a lawyer for the six Iranian and Franco-Iranian plaintiffs said.
Their case refers to public threats issued by the three men between December 2022 and January 2023 against people backing the nationwide protests in Iran over the murder of Mahsa Amini, arrested for violating Iran’s female dress code.
The threats are a continuation of a pattern Salami has exhibited in the past against Iran’s foes – real and perceived, as Breitbart News reported.
Iran General Hossein Salami said he seeks revenge against the U.S. that "will be hard, firm, regrettable, decisive and complete." https://t.co/9xWXPX0JEW
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) January 7, 2020
Khatib said on December 13 last year that “anyone playing a role in the riots will be punished, wherever they are in the world”.
The declaration was spread widely in the press and on social media, according to the text of the criminal complaint seen by AFP.
Salami himself said on January 10 that “the French people and the managers of (satirical anti-clerical magazine) Charlie Hebdo” should not “concern themselves with the fate of Salman Rushdie”.
The British author has long been subject to a fatwa calling for his killing issued by Iran’s late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and was gravely wounded in an August 2022 knife attack, as Breitbart News reported.
Charlie Hebdo staff were massacred by jihadist gunmen in 2015 after publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed and have since endured other threats delivered by Tehran’s operatives.
Iran has publicly threatened artists who drew cartoons mocking the country’s supreme leader after they were published in French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo. https://t.co/4mYvHhGxaN
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) January 9, 2023
“These threats are in fact just so many disguised fatwas” — an Islamic legal decree — against Iranian opposition activists around the world, said Chirinne Ardakani, a French-Iranian lawyer from the Iran Justice Collective.
“The regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its agents are keeping up a long tradition of threatening Iranian opposition figures in exile with death, hunting and murdering them on French and European soil,” the 22-page legal complaint read.
AFP contributed to this report
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