Members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) have openly infiltrated the cultural and religious centres to spy on and threaten both Iranian dissidents now based in the UK and Britain generally, the Joint Committee on Human Rights heard.
One dissident giving evidence on the scale and seriousness of the threat has been shot twice by IRGC agents and only survived a fatal bullet when the gun jammed.
Hossein Abedini, Deputy Director of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, told MPs and Lords at the Parliamentary committee that Iran saw Britain as a soft touch, unwilling to hit the regime with enough force to do damage and willing to allow its agents to enter and leave the UK unhindered.
He said: “The Iranian regime has always considered the UK a weak link in western countries. This is why they have been so brazenly attacking even the UK embassy in Tehran.
“They are so brazenly attacking Iranian dissidents in the UK too. According to the head of MI5 20 assassination plots have been stopped by the police… but it is going to happen to Iranians living here.
“I have been considered by the police as someone who is under serious threat by the Iranian regime. »
Chair of the Committee Lord Alton called the IRGC threat “a very complex and worrying issue” and added Mr Abedini served as “an inspiration to us all”.
Mr Abedini is the second in command at the NCRI in the UJK. The NCRI is a Paris-based international group of Iranian dissidents and their main constituent group, the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran, has a vast network of activists in Iran, calling for the overthrow of Khamenei and the installing of Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the NCRI.
Rajavi, and her 10-point plan for a democratic, gender-equal, nuclear free Iran, which has received the support of more than 4,000 MPs and 137 former world leaders.
He said three things needed to happen to make the UK safe from the IRGC threat.
The Revolutionary Guard – an Ayatollah-led force designed to crack down brutally on dissent in Iran and abroad – must be “proscribed” and highlighted as a a terror group.
The mosques and cultural centres harbouring the Ayatollah operatives must be closed, Iran’s embassy in London must be closed and the ambassador and operatives expelled.
He told the Committee: “By putting the IRCG on the banned terror list, by closing down the cultural centres the Iranian regime is using as front for inflicting this transnational repression on Iranians, and shutting down the embassies and expelling the ambassadors and agents of the regime – because their spies can so easily travel to the regime then back to the UK unhindered.”
Earlier this week Security minister Dan Jarvis announced that Iran was the first foreign power to be placed on the enhanced tier of a new government scheme to protect the UK from covert foreign influence known as the foreign influence registration scheme (FIRS).
He warned evidence of the Iranian regime’s actions against UK targets had “substantially increased” in recent years and that Tehran had become “increasingly emboldened, asserting itself more aggressively to advance their objectives and undermine ours”.
He also revealed that MI5 investigations into state threats jumped by 48% last year.
However, FIRS will not come into effect until much later this year – and it stops short of proscribing the IRGC.
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