Twenty years in prison for an Iranian diplomat

This is yet another irritant in the already difficult relationship between Europeans and Iran, and it comes as the new US administration seeks to reconnect with Tehran.

An Iranian diplomat, Assadolah Assadi, was sentenced to the maximum sentence of twenty years in prison on Thursday by the court in Antwerp in Belgium for having organized an abortive attack against opponents in the Paris suburbs in 2018.

Third adviser to the Iranian embassy in Austria, Assadolah Assadi, 49, who denies the facts, was being prosecuted for "

terrorist assassination attempts

" and "

participation in the activities of a terrorist group

".

He had three accomplices of Iranian origin.

Ms. Nasimeh Naami, 36, was sentenced to eighteen years in prison and her companion, Amir Saadouni (40) to fifteen.

The ex-dissident, Mehrdad Arefani (57), presented as an Iranian intelligence agent acting from Belgium was sentenced to seventeen years.

The only defendant present, he remained impassive at the pronouncement of his sentence.

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A bomb attack was to target on June 30, 2018 in Villepinte, near Paris, the annual gathering of the National Council of Iranian Resistance (NCRI), a coalition of opponents including the People's Mujahedin, whose headquarters have long been in France.

But Mr. Assadi had been spotted two days before in Luxembourg, dressed as a tourist, hat and camera, handing the Belgian-Iranian couple a package containing a bomb.

This allowed the Belgian justice to quickly go back to the third counselor of the Iranian embassy in Vienna.

On his way back to Austria, he was arrested on July 1 in Germany, where he no longer enjoyed his diplomatic immunity.

The day before, the Belgian-Iranian couple had been arrested by the Belgian police near Brussels in possession of 500 grams of TATP explosives and a detonator in their car.

This arrest in extremis made it possible to avoid an attack against the gathering of opponents with its prestigious guests, the Franco-Colombian and ex-hostage of the Farc, Ingrid Betancourt, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump's lawyer, and some ex- French dignitaries.

Incarcerated in Germany, then handed over to Belgium, Assadolah Assadi, who had transported the explosives on a commercial flight Tehran-Vienna, had refused to be taken out of his cell to appear at his trial on November 27.

The investigation showed that Assadi is an Iranian intelligence agent

"acting under diplomatic cover

", and that he coordinated this terrorist project by relying on his three accomplices.

Source of tension

“Unfortunately, Belgium and certain European countries, influenced by the hostile atmosphere propagated by a terrorist group, have taken an illegal and unjustifiable action

, reacted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tehran

.

They must therefore be held accountable for gross violations of the rights of our diplomats

”.

The Islamic Republic has already warned that it will not recognize the judgment, affirming that the procedure initiated by the Belgian justice was "

not legitimate, because of the diplomatic immunity

" of Mr. Assadi.

The affair had sparked serious tensions between France and Iran, recalling the dark hours of terrorism of the 1980s, unmanned from Tehran, in response to French arms deliveries to Saddam Hussein, who had just declared war on his Iranian neighbor.

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This judgment will worsen tensions between Iran and the West, as Tehran and Washington seek to return to the 2015 international nuclear agreement from which Donald Trump withdrew in 2018 before imposing heavy sanctions on the Republic. Islamic.

Last March, according to a Belgian police document obtained by Reuters, Mr. Assadi clearly threatened the Belgian authorities with reprisals by

"unknown groups

" if he was found guilty.

With regard to France, Iran keeps repeating that the presence of the People's Mujahedin in France constitutes "

a serious problem harming the

bilateral

relationship

".

Against a background of persistent divergence over Iranian nuclear power, this deteriorated with the detention from the summer of 2018 of the Franco-Iranian researcher Fariba Adelkhah, under house arrest for several months in Tehran.

Her companion, Roland Marchal, arrested at the same time as she was, was released last year in exchange for France's release of an Iranian engineer, whose extradition the United States was demanding.

With this affair, mixing espionage and terrorism, “hostage diplomacy” could experience new twists and turns.