Posted on 01/17/2007 6:19:37 AM PST by Valin
Tehran, 17 Jan. (AKI) - One of the five Iranians arrested last week by the US army in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil is wanted in Austria in connection with the assassination of Kurdish leader Andol Rahman Ghassemlu in 1989. Mahommad Jaafari Sharoudi was one of five Iranian officials detained last week in the Kurdish-controlled city on charges of being connected to a faction of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the Pasdaran, that funds and arms insurgents in Iraq.
Abdol Rahman Ghassemlu, the historic leader of Iranian Kurds, was killed in an apartment in the outskirts of the Austrian capital Vienna where he was scheduled to meet a delegation sent by then Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
However, shortly after the start of the meeting between a delegation of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) and Tehran's delegation, a special unit of the Pasdaran is believed to have stormed the apartment and killed Ghassmlu and his aides.
According to the Austrian police, the killers escaped arrest by hiding in Iran's embassy in Vienna.
Austrian sources claim that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was at the time a Pasdaran official, was the logistics' head of the commando group responsible for the Kurdish leader's death while Jaafari Sharoudi was one of the killers.
Thanks for the ping. Hakim at it once again. Allawi appears to be the only partially reliable A Rab in the whole of Iraq.
I like to think that, by the end of 2008, he'll be just some newsreel footage.
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