Did Iran Kidnap Dissident in Paris?
It seems that Iranian agents may have kidnapped a dissident in Paris and taken him to Tehran a few days ago.
While there are few details out now, here are the main elements: The story was first reported yesterday by the Metula News Agency (MENA), a French-language Israeli news service that usually provides reliable, and sometimes hard to find, information. So far, they are the only news agency to have reported this story.
Mohammad-Reza (Arash) Fakhravar, an Iranian student who is the brother of Amir-Abbas Fakhravar, the president of the Confederation of Iranian Students, seems to have been kidnapped on April 29th by personnel from the Iranian embassy in Paris
According to MENA, he was then taken to Orly airport and put on Iran Air 732 flight en route to Tehran. During the kidnapping, Fakhravar managed to alert his brother in Washington, DC about his situation.
His brother then alerted both the FBI and his mother in Tehran, who ran to the Khomeini airport in order to look for her son. A member of the airport staff told her confidentially that her son had been taken to Evin prison, where many political prisoners are detained.
And that's all that’s been reported thus far. There isn’t much mention of it in the mainstream French media, nor anywhere else as far as I can see. And there’s been absolutely no reaction from French authorities.
If the story is true, and MENA's record tends to make it plausible, it's possible the French government wants to keep things quiet and try to find some sort of solution.
While silencing the press and letting the guy rot in jail could have been an option before the Internet, that seems unlikely now and Sarkozy's policy doesn’t seem to mesh with that approach. We can only suppose that more details will emerge in the coming days.
The story, in French, is on the MENA website. They may provide an English version later on, as they sometimes do.
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