APPREHENDED

  • Full name: Assadollah Assadi
  • Pseudonym: “Danial”
  • Alternatives: N/a
  • Location: Belgium, Iran, fmr Austria, fmr Iraq
  • Affiliation: Ministry of Intelligence of the Islamic Republic of Iran [MOIS]

Assadollah Assadi (°1971) is a state terrorist who worked for Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. An enigmatic figure, he is believed to have been deployed to Iraq before being dispatched to Vienna.1 From 2014 onwards, Assadi served as the head of Iranian secret service operations in Austria while posing as a diplomat.2 In that capacity, he ran an extensive spy network to monitor Iranian exiled dissidents all over Europe.3 Assadi is known to have met with agents and informants in Austria, Belgium, Czechia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland.4

In 2018, elements within the Iranian intelligence community tasked him with bombing the annual gathering of the National Council of the Iranian Resistance [NCRI] in Paris and possible kill its leader Maryam Rajavi.5 He subsequently served as the coordinator of a small cell of Belgian-based infiltrators of the local Iranian dissident community that was ordered to carry out the attack.6 Assadi later smuggled the explosive device to Europe in a diplomatic pouch on a commercial fight between Tehran and Vienna.7

On Jun. 30, 2018, Belgian special forces arrested two of the cell’s operatives in a suburb of Brussels as they were on their way to launch the attack.8 Experts control-detonated the bomb. French police caught another of Assadi’s associates in Paris. Assadi himself was apprehended the next day by German police at a fuel station near the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg.9 Officers also seized his laptop, cell phones, documents and parts of his bookkeeping.10 He was extradited to Belgium in October 2018.11 During questioning, Assadi refused to give statements.12 He declined to attend his trial and was later sentenced to twenty years in prison by a court in Antwerp on Feb. 04, 2021.13 In May 2021, Assadi renounced his right to appeal the verdict.14

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