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NCRI –\u00a0Following the United Nations fourth resolution condemning Iran regime for the 1988 massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in Iran, Hashemi Rafsanjani said: \u201cThese claimed executions are just rumors for propaganda purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the time, despite ample evidence and after the UN General Assembly adopted the resolution in 1988, Rafsanjani came to the scene on December 2, 1988 to conceal the crime and deny it ever happened to evade accountability. He told state-run news agencies: \u201cThe claimed executions are just rumors for propaganda purpose in order to cover up internal crisis within the People\u2019s Mojahedin Organization (PMOI\/MEK) and to take the organization out of impasse.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition, Rafsanjani on December 3, 1988, following wave of international condemnations of the 1988 massacre and crimes committed by the regime, once again tried to cover-up the crime and said: \u201cThis false and bizarre propaganda that Mojahedin have launched in Europe and Western countries claiming that several thousand of their forces have been executed in Iran, their aim is to bring them out of the impasse,\u201d (State-run Resalat newspaper, December 3, 1988).<\/p>\n
Backgroun<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Former Iranian President Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who died on January 8, 2017, aged 82, was one of the two pillars and \u2018key to the equilibrium\u2019 of the Iranian regime.<\/p>\n Over the past 38 years, both under Khomeini and in later years, Rafsanjani played a critical role in suppression at home and export of terrorism abroad as well as in the quest to acquire nuclear weapons. Though portrayed by some Western media outlets as a \u201cpragmatist\u201d or \u201cmoderate,\u201d during his long career he was associated with some of the regime\u2019s most egregious actions, including mass-casualty terror attacks and the assassinations of exiled dissidents.<\/p>\n \u201cRafsanjani, who had always been the regime’s number two, acted as its balancing factor and played a decisive role in its preservation. Now, the regime will lose its internal and external equilibrium,\u201d opposition leader Maryam Rajavi said in a statement that also referred to the \u201capproaching overthrow\u201d of the clerical regime.<\/p>\n Suppression at home<\/strong><\/p>\n \u2022 According to Khomeini’s former heir Hossein-Ali Montazeri, Khomeini sought counsel on his dangerous decisions from these just two individuals: Rafsanjani and current Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. This included his decision to issue a fatwa ordering the massacre of some 30,000 political prisoners at the end of the Iran-Iraq war in the summer of 1988.<\/p>\n Terrorism abroad:<\/strong><\/p>\n The assassination of Iranian dissidents abroad and the regime\u2019s terror attacks skyrocketed during Rafsanjani\u2019s tenure as President and as head of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), a body that oversees and authorizes the regime\u2019s terrorist operations. The mullahs\u2019 terror targets were not only Iranians.<\/p>\n \u2022 The Associated Press reported Rafsanjani\u2019s remarks on May 5, 1989 as carried by Iran\u2019s official state news agency IRNA: \u201cIf in retaliation for every Palestinian martyred in Palestine, they will kill and execute, not inside Palestine, five Americans or Britons or Frenchmen, the Israelis could not continue to do these wrongs\u2026 It is not hard to kill Americans or Frenchmen. It is a bit difficult to Kill [Israelis]. But there are so many [Americans and Frenchmen] everywhere in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n The investigators accused Iran of instructing its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, to carry out the bombing. They issued arrest warrants for Rafsanjani, seven other senior Iranians, and a Lebanese national, Hezbollah terrorist chief Imad Mughniyah.<\/p>\n \u2022 The FBI established undeniable evidence that Tehran had masterminded the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia on June 25, 1996, resulting in the deaths of 19 American servicemen.<\/p>\n Here are some of the most significant killings of prominent dissidents abroad during Rafsanjani\u2019s tenure:<\/p>\n \u2022 The assassination in 1992 of four Iranian Kurdish dissidents in a Berlin restaurant called Mykonos. A German court in 1996 ruled that the Iranian regime under Rafsanjani was directly responsible for the Mykonos killings, a finding which the U.S. State Department said at the time provided further proof that Iran was a terrorist state.<\/p>\n \u2022 Kazem Rajavi of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) \u2013 Iran\u2019s most renowned human rights advocate and a former Iranian ambassador to the U.N. and Maryam Rajavi\u2019s brother-in-law \u2013was shot dead near Geneva in 1990. Swiss investigators accused the Iranian regime of responsibility and authorities issued an arrest warrant for Ali Fallahian, Rafsanjani\u2019s intelligence minister.<\/p>\n \u2022 The NCRI representative in Rome, Mohammad Hossein Naghdi, shot dead on a street in the Italian capital in March 1993.<\/p>\n \u2022 Zahra Rajabi, the NCRI\u2019s representative on refugee issues, shot dead with an NCRI colleague in an Istanbul apartment in February 1996.<\/p>\n Advancing the Iranian nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles program:<\/strong><\/p>\n The Iranian clandestine nuclear weapons program had a jump start under Rafsanjani and he was the one who really pushed this program forward as a guarantor of the regime\u2019s survival. He intensified cooperation with countries like North Korea to achieve these objectives.<\/p>\n In an interview published by the regime’s official state news agency IRNA on October 27, 2015, Rafsanjani acknowledged that during his time as parliamentary speaker and President, both he and Khamenei sought ways to obtain a nuclear bomb.<\/p>\n “Our basic doctrine was always a peaceful nuclear application, but it never left our mind that if one day we should be threatened and it was imperative, we should be able to go down the other path,” Rafsanjani said.<\/p>\n Rafsanjani added he had travelled to Pakistan to try to meet Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, who later helped North Korea to develop a bomb, but did not meet with him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NCRI – Following the United Nations fourth resolution condemning Iran regime for the 1988 massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in Iran, Hashemi Rafsanjani said: “These claimed executions are just rumors for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":47825,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[175],"class_list":{"0":"post-21911","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-iran-a-world","8":"tag-updated"},"yoast_head":"\n![](\"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/images\/stories\/2017\/regime\/regime-2\/Rafsanjani-1.jpg\" "\\"Rafsanjani-1\\"")
Rafsanjani was a stalwart of the Iranian regime and is considered as one of its founding fathers. He played an outsized political role in the life of the Islamic republic, serving as President from 1989-1997 (after serving as Speaker of Parliament and Deputy Commander of the Armed Forces), but also heading two of the regime\u2019s most important institutions \u2013 the Assembly of Experts, an 88-member body of top clerics which nominates the Supreme Leader; and the Expediency Council, a body that advises the Supreme Leader.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/images\/stories\/2017\/regime\/regime-2\/Rafsanjani-2.png\" "\\"Rafsanjani-2\\"")
\u2022 Rafsanjani viciously called for the extermination of members of Iran\u2019s main opposition group, the People\u2019s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI or MEK). On October 3, 1981, the state-run Ettela\u2019at daily wrote:
\u201cReferring to the grouplets\u2019 operations, Hashemi Rafsanjani, Speaker of the Islamic Parliament and Tehran\u2019s acting Friday prayer leader, said in his sermon:
\u2018Divine law defines four sentences for them which must be carried out: 1 \u2013 kill them, 2 \u2013 hang them, 3 \u2013 cut off their arms and legs, 4 \u2013 banish them\u2026
\u2018Had we caught and executed 200 of them right after the Revolution, they would not have multiplied so much. If we don\u2019t deal decisively with [Mojahedin] armed grouplet and agents of America and the Soviet Union today, in three years we will have to execute thousands of them instead of one thousand now\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/images\/stories\/2017\/regime\/regime-2\/Rafsanjani-3.jpg\" "\\"Rafsanjani-3\\"")
\u2022 In 2006, Rafsanjani was implicated by Argentinian investigators in one of the deadliest instances of Iranian terrorism abroad \u2013 a 1994 suicide truck bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, in which 85 people were killed.<\/p>\n![\"Rafsanjani-4\"](\"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/images\/stories\/2017\/regime\/regime-2\/Rafsanjani-4.jpg\" "\\"Rafsanjani-4\\"")
At Argentina\u2019s request, Interpol then issued red notices \u2013 the organization\u2019s equivalent of arrest warrants \u2013 for five of the Iranians and Mughniyah.<\/p>\n