New State Department Measures Should Lead to Broader Exposure of Iran’s Crimes

[Geee]

American Greatness

The State Department last week issued a statement updating an earlier announcement of visa restrictions on 14 Iranian nationals. The update took the valuable step of identifying the targets by name and specifying they had been responsible for “gross violations of human rights” while “acting under the highest orders of their government to silence opposition and show that no one is safe from the Iranian regime, no matter where they live.”

The designees were involved in the assassination in Geneva of Kazem Rajavi in April 1990. Rajavi was the brother-in-law of Maryam Rajavi, the president of the National Council of Resistance of Iran. 

Kazem, then-representative for the Resistance movement at the United Nations, was gunned down while driving to his home outside of Geneva. The operation had been carefully planned, with the team of assassins visiting the city on at least three occasions prior to executing the plot. They promptly fled Switzerland after the killing and were afforded the utmost protection from their government even after Swiss authorities issued an arrest warrant for all 13 suspects.

Not only has that warrant gone unserved, but in June, a Swiss public prosecutor announced the case against the killers might be dropped due to the expiration of a statute of limitations. While it seems strange that there would be any statute of limitations on the crime of terrorist murder, the larger problem arguably is a lack of effort on the part of Western authorities to apprehend the perpetrators of Iranian terror operations and human rights abuses or to hold them accountable by any other available means.