Townhall | Struan Stevenson | May 19, 2025
Tennessee Williams once said, “The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!” He would have found a perfect example in the Iranian Foreign Minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi. Five men, four of whom were Iranian nationals, were arrested on 4 May by British Counter Terrorism Police, with the help of armed military personnel, on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act targeting the Israeli Embassy in London. A further three Iranian men were arrested the same day in London as part of a separate counter-terrorism operation under section 27 of the UK’s National Security Act 2023, a law that regulates espionage, sabotage, and foreign interference. The Iranian regime’s foreign minister immediately issued a statement “categorically” denying any involvement in the plots. Accusing the UK of “derailing diplomacy”, Araghchi said the allegations were part of a “history of third parties bent on derailing diplomacy” and “provoking escalation, resorting to desperate measures, including false flag operations”.
Araghchi is both a liar and a hypocrite. He is the mouthpiece of a regime that uses its embassies as bomb factories and diplomats as assassins. For him to accuse the UK of “derailing diplomacy” is pure hypocrisy, when in 2018, one of the Iranian regime’s registered diplomats – Assadollah Assadi, from the Iranian Embassy in Vienna, was caught red-handed after handing over a professionally constructed ½ kilo triacetone triperoxide (tatp) bomb to three Iranian co-conspirators. Assadi had instructed his co-conspirators to detonate the device at a major rally near Paris organised by the National Council for Resistance in Iran (NCRI) and attended by over 100,000 people, including hundreds of leading politicians from around the world. If the bomb had exploded, hundreds, potentially thousands, would have been killed and injured. Assadi was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment in Belgium but released on the orders of the Belgian government in a shameful prisoner-swap deal with the Iranian regime, who had taken a young Belgian charity worker hostage and sentenced him to 40 years jail and 80 lashes on fake espionage charges. Assadi returned to a hero’s welcome in Tehran.
The Assadi case was just one of countless outrages involving Iranian diplomatic staff. In December 2018, the Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama closed the Iranian Embassy in Tirana and expelled Ambassador Gholamhossein Mohammadnia and Mostafa Roudaki, station chief of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), for terrorist plots targeting Iranian dissidents residing in Albania. Albania’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman told reporters that the diplomats were suspected of “involvement in activities that harm the country’s security” and for “violating their diplomatic status and supporting terrorism.”
Then, in an outrageous atrocity in November 2023, there was an attempt to assassinate the former Senior Vice President of the European Parliament and a key opponent of the mullahs’ regime – Alejo Vidal Quadras, as he strolled outside his home in the Salamanca district of Madrid. Despite being shot in the face at point-blank range, Professor Vidal Quadras miraculously survived. So far, seven people have been arrested for involvement in the attempted murder, all of whom have direct links to Tehran. A report issued by the Dutch Ministry of Intelligence (AIVD) has specifically named the Iranian regime as the likely sponsor of assassination attempts on European soil. The report highlighted the case of two suspects arrested in the Dutch city of Haarlem as they attempted to murder an Iranian dissident. One of the two men arrested was also suspected of involvement in the attempted killing of Professor Vidal Quadras. The report stated: “On the basis of intelligence, it is probable that Iran is responsible for assassination attempts.”
The Iranian regime is known to be a major sponsor of international terror. For years, it has funded, supplied, and trained the terrorist groups Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the now defunct Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. For the mullahs’ foreign minister, Araghchi, to plead innocence and demand that “the UK authorities should afford our citizens due process” scrapes the bottom of the barrel of mendacity. Araghchi’s regime has never afforded due process to anyone who opposes its repressive tyranny. Iran has carried out a frenzy of over 1,100 state executions since the so-called ‘moderate’ President Masoud Pezeshkian took office on July 8, 2024. Most were political prisoners, arrested, tortured, and sentenced to death without due process.
In October last year, the head of the UK’s MI5 security service, Ken McCallum, said authorities had stopped 20 state-backed plots hatched by Iran in the UK since 2022. In such circumstances, Araghchi’s “categorical denial” and protests of innocence wear a little thin. He and his fellow ministers represent a dangerous, pariah regime, hellbent on developing a nuclear weapon and ballistic missile systems capable of delivering it. Given the Iranian regime’s ongoing aggressive and murderous behaviour, Western leaders should stop all further negotiations, blacklist the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – the mullahs’ Gestapo, close all Iranian embassies and expel their diplomats. The UK government must also now issue a warning to British citizens not to travel to Iran, and if they do so, it is at their own risk. The mullahs will now be searching for unwitting British men and women who can be held hostage and exchanged for their prisoners in England.
The arrests of seven Iranian nationals in the UK on suspicion of terrorist and espionage plots may yet reveal a new and sinister development. After the failed attempt to assassinate Alejo Vidal Quadras, are the mullahs no longer willing to trust gangsters from third countries to do their dirty work? Are they now going to deploy their own trained commandos for terrorist operations?
https://townhall.com/columnists/struanstevenson/2025/05/19/seven-iranians-arrested-in-uk-n2657247
