A terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist

By Aussiegirl

Forget about the photo match -- we know who this guy is. The Australian has the background story on the new president of Iran. Looks like we now have a full-fledged terrorist in charge of a nuclear state. Things are about to get very interesting. Remember the old Chinese curse -- "May you live in interesting times."

INTELLIGENCE sources and Iranian opposition figures have accused Iran's new President of being involved in a string of assassinations in the Middle East and Europe in the 1980s and 90s.

The claims follow last week's allegations that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad participated in the student takeover of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979.

According to a report in The Sunday Times of London, Kazem Sami, who was the first Iranian health minister after the 1979 Islamic revolution but fell out with the ayatollahs, was the first of dozens of dissidents to die.

He was working in a Tehran clinic in November 1988 when an assailant posing as a patient stabbed him repeatedly.

The following July, three gunmen burst into a Vienna flat and opened fire on a meeting of Iranian Kurdish exiles.

Among three people killed was Abdul Rahman Qassemlou, the leader of Kurdish opposition to the ayatollahs in Tehran. The murders have never been solved.

An Austrian Interior Ministry spokesman said at the weekend that the Austrian Government had documents implicating Mr Ahmadinejad in the Qassemlou assassination.
"A dossier concerning Mr Ahmadinejad was submitted to the Federal Counter Terrorism Agency, which handed it over to the public prosecutor's office," Rudolf Gollia said. Vienna's public prosecutor's office was not available for comment.

Almost a decade after the Vienna murders, a clandestine group of Iranian militants began plotting the murder of British author Salman Rushdie, the victim of a fatwa sentencing him to death for supposed blasphemy in his book The Satanic Verses.

For years there had been only the vaguest allegations of a link between those events.
All that has changed with the election of Mr Ahmadinejad, the hardline former mayor of Tehran.

Mr Ahmadinejad's surprise victory in last month's poll has unleashed a flood of accusations, innuendo and investigations of his militant pedigree.

Iranian opposition websites are buzzing with reports of a leaked document that purportedly proves Mr Ahmadinejad, 49, led a team of would-be assassins that plotted to murder Rushdie. The document remained untraceable last week but a prominent opposition figure, Maryam Rajavi, of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, denounced Mr Ahmadinejad as a "terrorist, torturer and executioner".

Iranian officials dismissed many of the allegations as "absurd" and motivated by political malice.

But a senior Washington official said "a lot of filing cabinets are rattling" as intelligence and law enforcement agencies search for clues to the Iranian strongman's past.

There was also concern in Europe that whatever the truth, a process of US-led "demonisation" had begun that would damage European efforts to solve the crisis over Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Using details provided by US regional specialists, official Iranian websites and previously reliable opposition sources, it proved possible to piece together a sobering account of the new President's ties to ultra-conservative, anti-Western factions.

These include a unit long-suspected by US intelligence agencies of directing state-sponsored terrorist activities abroad.

With the return to Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolution's spiritual leader, Mr Ahmadinejad became his university's representative in the Student Office for Strengthening Unity, which played a central role in the seizure of the US embassy in 1979.

Several former embassy hostages claimed last week that Mr Ahmadinejad was among the students who held them captive for 444 days.

But experts using advanced facial recognition technology have established that he is not the man identified on last week's widely distributed photograph of hostages and captors. US officials, however, said they were continuing to investigate his possible role.

As Islamic rule intensified in the early 1980s with purges of moderate students, Mr Ahmadinejad joined the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, the ultra-conservative military elite fiercely loyal to the ayatollahs.

A senior officer in the IRGC's special "internal security" brigade, Mr Ahmadinejad's duties included the suppression of dissident activity, which, according to his rivals, involved the interrogation, torture and execution of political prisoners.

US intelligence sources and Iranian opposition figures believe Mr Ahmadinejad became a key figure in the formation of the IRGC's Qods Force, which has been linked to assassinations in the Middle East and Europe, including the murder of Qassemlou.