Iran diplomat given 20 years for Paris bomb plot

AFP | Antwerp

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

A Belgian court convicted an Iranian diplomat Thursday for plotting a thwarted 2018 bombing of an opposition rally outside Paris and ordered him jailed for 20 years.

Assadollah Assadi, now 49, was attached to the Iranian mission in Austria when he supplied explosives for the planned attack.

After the attack was foiled, he was arrested in Germany in July 2018, where he was deemed not to be able to claim diplomatic immunity.

The June 30, 2018 gathering in Villepinte, near Paris, included senior leaders of the exiled National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI) and some high-profile supporters including former US President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

The case has shone a light on Tehran's international operations just as it hopes the arrival of new US President Joe Biden will herald a loosening of sanctions.

Assadi was tried in the Belgian port city of Antwerp along with the three co-accused who was also arrested after police foiled the plot.

The diplomat was charged with "attempted murders of a terrorist nature" and "taking part in the activity of a terrorist group".

Belgian-Iranian couple Nasimeh Naami, 36, and Amir Saadouni, 40, accepted from Assadi a half-kilo of TATP explosives and a detonator.

Naami received an 18-year sentence and Saadouni 15 years.

Belgium-based Iranian poet Mehrdad Arefani was an accomplice of Assadi's who had been due to guide the couple at the rally. He was jailed for 17 years.

Belgian officers halted the couple's car with the bomb onboard on the day of the event, preventing what the NCRI's lawyers said would have been a "bloodbath".

Later that year, the French government accused Iran's intelligence service of being behind the operation, a charge the Islamic Republic has furiously denied.