"I was coming home from walking the Retiro and when I reached the sidewalk I heard a voice: 'Hello sir.'
I shook my head.
The detonation [of the shot] sounded like a roar.
I became extremely dazed and thought, 'the Iranian regime.'
It was automatic.
I saw that I was thinking, that I wasn't fainting, and I thought: 'You're alive.'
This is how Alejo Vidal-Quadras, former vice president of the European Parliament, described this Friday the attack he suffered on November 9 in the center of Madrid.
An attack that kept him hospitalized for 16 days, five in the ICU, and several months convalescing at his home.
Three and a half months after the bullet of a Franco-Tunisian hitman passed through his jaw, the former leader of the Popular Party and Vox has appeared looking good and in good spirits at a massive press conference held at the headquarters of the Press Association. from Madrid.
He was accompanied by his wife, his daughter, family members, and the three escort police officers who have become his shadow.
Also, his lawyer Carmen Ladrón de Guevara, a lawyer from the Association of Victims of Terrorism.
And she started her intervention with humor: “Excuse my voice because of the surgery, although I never had a crystal-clear voice.
“I still have some paralysis in my facial muscles.”
Vidal-Quadras described his survival of this attack as a miracle.
“I made a head movement that made the shot deflect, I tilted my head so that the shot entered the jaw, went down and came out.
It was a miracle.
A man, he took off his sweatshirt and put it on the holes in my face.
Thanks to him I didn't faint and I am very grateful.
The ambulance arrived and I went to Gregorio Marañón.
Already in the ambulance I told them (the nurses) on their cell phone: 'Iran.'
The founder of Vox, a party he abandoned, has directly blamed the Iranian Government for organizing, financing and carrying out his attack.
A regime that he pointed out as the mastermind of numerous deadly attacks abroad.
“Why the Iranian regime?
During my 15 years as Vice President of the European Parliament I have very actively and visibly supported the National Council of Iranian Resistance.
I have supported him in a public, visible way.
I have distinguished myself for that task.”
Thus, he recalled that in 2008 he founded the International Committee of Justice to coordinate the activities of the resistance with politicians from Europe and the United States.
“This Council has become an important factor in raising awareness about human rights violations in Iran and the destructive role of the mullahs in exporting Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in the region.”
Vidal-Quadras described two different stages of the current Iranian regime's criminal persecution of its opponents.
A first with attacks in Europe, Asia and the United States in which they used their own agents.
And he recounted deadly attacks in Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France.
Of the first he cited the murders in 1992 in the Mikonos restaurant in Berlin of Kurdish leaders.
A German court determined that the orders had come from senior officials in Tehran;
the execution in Switzerland, in 1989, of Kazem Radjavi, Iran's first ambassador to the United Nations, who had defected;
or that of former Iranian Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar, in Paris in 1991;
also the murder in Italy of the diplomat Mohammad Hossein Naghdi, shot in broad daylight in Rome, among others.
And a second stage of crimes starting in 2017, which includes his attempted murder, in which the regime began to hire hitmen from criminal gangs.
“Since then, they have hired criminal gangs who are the ones who do their work.
When these criminals are arrested, they refuse to testify in case they say something, they are killed.
“Everyone refuses to make statements,” explained Vidal-Quadras.
“I trust in the Spanish Justice, I trust in the investigation.
It is not easy to establish the link [with the Iranian Government].
"I don't know how the judicial process will end."
Vidal-Quadras confessed to having been disturbed when his name appeared in first place on a blacklist drawn up by the Iranian Government along with other Spanish and European MEPs who have shown their support for the resistance.
“I got worried.
“I wasn’t scared, but I thought they wouldn’t dare do anything to me.”
When describing the people arrested so far for his attack, he highlighted the fact of the diversity of their nationalities (Tunisian, French, Moroccan, Venezuelan and Spanish) and assured that this circumstance supports his thesis.
“It was a plan developed over months of monitoring.
I have not been a victim of an ordinary criminal group, but of a dictatorial, totalitarian and criminal regime.
“Of a political regime.”
The former popular politician concluded by expressing his willingness to continue supporting the Iranian resistance in exile.
“The intention was to remove a very annoying enemy and scare those who support the Iranian resistance.
They have not achieved their objective.
I plan to continue doing it for the rest of my life and with more motivation than I have had until now.”
Vidal-Quadras called for a change of policy in the European Union towards the Iranian regime.
"The pact is useless, we must expel Iran's false diplomats in Europe and support the democratic opposition."
In his opinion, the Iranian embassies “are a planning center for terrorist actions.”
Members of the Iranian resistance in exile financed the creation of Vox and the European election campaign of the then leader of that party with one million euros, as revealed by this newspaper.
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