Iran Court Sentences Princeton's Mousavian In Corruption Case
A former Iranian diplomat who is currently a Princeton University scholar has been sentenced to 11 months in prison over his role in a corruption case in Iran.
A former Iranian diplomat who is currently a Princeton University scholar has been sentenced to 11 months in prison over his role in a corruption case in Iran.
Iranian Judiciary Spokesman Zabihollah Khodayian said on Monday Hossein Mousavian was an advisor in a €2-billion case in the Persian Gulf island of Kish in the 2000s.
According to Khodayian, Mousavian brokered a deal to give 200 hectares of the island and 100 thousand square meters of its territorial waters to a third party but the resort project was never carried out.
Earlier in January, his remarks in a documentary to mark Qasem Soleimani’s second death anniversary led to controversy when he gloated about how Iran’s threat to avenge Soleimani killing frightened the wife of Brian Hook, Washington’s special envoy for Iran at the time.
Advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) has also called on Princeton “to dismiss him from any association or affiliation with the university without delay”, noting that “Mousavian’s affiliation with Princeton is a stain on the university’s reputation and credibility”.
UANI described him as “an agent of the Iranian regime” who is currently employed as a Middle East and nuclear policy specialist at the university.
Late in December, an American academic who was imprisoned in Iran for 1,216 days, said Mousavian is sympathetic to the Iranian regime, claiming that he stymied efforts to free him from prison.
Mousavian, who traveled to Iran to attend the funeral service of Soleimani, was Tehran’s ambassador to Germany when four Iranian dissidents were assassinated at Berlin's Mykonos restaurant in 1992.
The letter, which was signed by Western-based secular and liberal groups opposed to the Islamic Republic, addressed the leaders of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, calling on them to end “the failed and catastrophic policy of negotiating with and appeasing the Islamic Republic”.
They told Emmanuel Macron, Boris Johnson, and Olaf Scholz that the regime with which they are engaged in talks “is the same fundamentalist regime that since its inception 43 years ago, has had terror, hostage-taking, and sabotage, as an integral part of its ideology and nature, and its most important tools for blackmailing the free world”.
Diplomats have said that nuclear talks, which began last April to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement (JCPOA), have made significant progress and a final deal is imminent soon. In case agreement is reached, Iran is set to receive billions of dollars of blocked funds and massive sanctions relief.
The signatories highlighted that the “Islamist revolutionary regime has carried out hundreds of terrorist attacks around world”, emphasizing that it has engaged in killings, bombings, and hostage taking, as well as issuing fatwas (decrees) for murder of innocent people.
This is “the same inhumane, misogynist, and anti-LGBTQ oppressive regime that, despite decades of attempts at dialogue and resolutions by the international community, still enforces medieval Sharia law,” which includes stoning, amputation, and flogging, the letter read.
The opposition groups stressed that the clerical government “carries out large-scale executions and imprisonments, often with the aim of suppressing and silencing political opponents”.
The Islamic Republic soon after its establishment cracked down on opposition and independent groups and has continued to ban civil society initiatives. Practically all opposition has been sent into exile or imprisoned.
They criticized the policy of the West, especially Europe, towards “this anti-Semitic regime,” saying “appeasement and the payment of ransoms in order to normalize and attempt to change the behavior of this inherently abnormal regime” have only emboldened it “in its terrorist activities, criminality, and nuclear and military ambitions”.
The signatories highlighted Iran’s track record of “insolence on the international stage and criminal suppression of the people”, stating that “Nearly two decades of counterproductive negotiations and flawed deals such as the JCPOA have only given the Islamic Republic a chance to buy time. By deceiving the international community, it has brought its nuclear and ballistic missile programs to an irreversible stage”.
Then opposition groups called for action, urging the three European powers “to put aside, once and for all, the failed and catastrophic policy of negotiating”, saying that now when the Islamic Republic is at the lowest level of popular legitimacy in its history it “is the time to choose another policy: Maximum support for the Iranian people to end more than four decades of medieval rule and replace it with a secular democratic system that serves Iran's national interests through peaceful coexistence and cooperation with neighbors and all countries in the world”.
“This is the only way to prevent the world's largest terrorist state from achieving the atomic bomb -- a catastrophe that will plunge the entire region into a nuclear arms race”, they wrote.
They asked the European leaders that instead of the Vienna talks they should “enter into a serious and effective dialogue with the democratic and national opposition of Iran, which wants a free and secular Iran”.
“Sooner or later, the Islamic Republic will be overthrown by the brave and courageous people of Iran, and the day after liberation, the Iranian people will remember who stood by them in difficult times and who aided their oppressors”, they concluded.
The American-Israeli software and hardware security company said in a comprehensive technical analysis published on February18 that the recent wave of attacks that caused major disruptions to public services are far from minor website defacements.
The report provided in-depth breakdowns for some of the attacks, including the targeted hack of the state broadcaster (IRIB) in late January, saying the attackers’ aim was also to disrupt the IRIB’s programs, with the damage to the TV and radio networks possibly more serious than officially reported.
Several television and radio channels of the state broadcaster were hacked on January 27 with photos of leaders of an opposition group briefly aired. The image of Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, leaders of the Albania-based opposition Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), were broadcast for around 10 seconds with audio footage from one of their speeches in the background.
After the picture of the MEK leaders, the video showed a photo of Iran’s Supreme leader Ali Khamenei with a red cross on it, as an off-camera voice said, “Death to Khamenei.” Khamenei was badly injured in 1981 in one of a series of bombings attributed to the MEK.
Check Point research team probed the cyberattack and was able to retrieve the files and forensic evidence from publicly available resources, finding malicious executables whose purpose was to air the protest message, as well as evidence that a wiper malware was used.
The security firm provided a technical analysis of the tools used in the attack, as well as the attackers’ tactics, identifying malware that takes screenshots of the victims’ screens, several custom-made backdoors, and related batch scripts and configuration files used to install and configure the malicious executables.
Check Point also gave a detailed report about other major cyber-attacks such as an attack that hit the Iranian national railway and cargo services in July 2021. The attack caused “unprecedented disruptions” to the country’s trains, a day before media outlets reported that the website of Iran’s Roads Ministry, in charge of transportation, was taken down in a ‘cyber disruption’, preventing access to their official portal and sub-services.
A message was also displayed on the train schedule boards referred perplexed passengers to the Supreme Leader’s office phone number.
A group called ‘Predatory Sparrow’ claimed responsibility for the attacks, whose tools and tactics were used in similar operations against private companies in Syria by an anti-regime group called Indra.
In August 2021, the hacktivist group Tapandegan (Palpitations), previously known for hacking and displaying protest messages on the electronic flight arrival and departure boards in Mashhad and Tabriz international airports in 2018, released security camera footage from Tehran's Evin Prison, where many political prisoners are held. Tapandegan said the images had been acquired by hackers called Edalat-e Ali (Ali's Justice) and were being circulated to draw attention to human rights violations, particularly against political prisoners.
In October 2021, all gas stations in Iran were paralyzed by an attack that disrupted the electronic payment process, leading to extremely long queues for two days that prevented customers from paying with the government-issued electronic cards used to purchase subsidized fuel. When the card was swiped for payment, the supreme leader’s office phone number appeared on the screen. Iranian officials claimed that foreign actors, such as Israel and the US, were behind the attack. However, Predatory Sparrow claimed responsibility for this attack as well.
On February 1, the web-based streaming platform of IRIB, Telewebion, was hijacked yet again to broadcast protest messages urging citizens to rebel and stating that “the regime’s foundations are rattling” in the middle of a live broadcast of the Iran-UAE soccer match.
Recently, on February 7, 2022, the Edalat-e Ali group released footage from closed-circuit cameras in another Iranian prison, Ghezel Hesar.
Check Point says it is still not clear how the attackers gained initial access to these networks that are “completely isolated, are equipped with acceptable security protocols and are not accessible via the Internet”.
It concluded that “the actor may have many capabilities that have yet to be explored. On the one hand, the attackers managed to pull off a complicated operation to bypass security systems and network segmentation, penetrate the broadcaster’s networks, produce and run the malicious tools that heavily rely on internal knowledge of the broadcasting software used by victims, all while staying under the radar during the reconnaissance and initial intrusion stages”.
Check Point also concluded that “the attackers’ tools are of relatively low quality and sophistication and are launched by clumsy and sometimes buggy 3-line batch scripts”, which supports their “theory that the attackers might have had help from insiders or indicate a yet unknown collaboration between different groups with different skills”.