Belgian Justice Ministry Says Prisoner Swap Deal Not Intended For Specific Person

Mario Abdo Benítez said in a press conference on Friday that a “large number” of Venezuelan-Iranian crew of the plane immobilized at Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires over suspected connections with Iran's Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force have “links to international terrorism.”

"Since Paraguay informed and alerted the authorities, they were able to make enquiries and we saw that a large part of the crew [made up of Iranians and Venezuelans] had links to international terrorism," he said. 

He added that one of the Boeing 747’s crew members had "even had an operation to change his face in Cuba,” admitting that the allegation is like something out of “a film.”

In June, Gerardo Milman, an Argentine lawmaker, told Iran International that Iranians aboard the Venezuelan plane planned “attacks on human targets.”

Contrary to Iran’s claim June 13 that the plane was not owned by an Iranian company and that any Iranians aboard were instructors, Milman said the pilot was “a senior official of Qods (Quds) force,” Tehran’s extraterritorial intelligence and secret ops outfit listed as a terrorist organization by the United States. 

Earlier in June, Paraguay's intelligence agency said Captain Gholamreza Ghasemi did not merely share a name with a member of the group but is in fact the same man.

The hacking group, reportedly affiliated with the Albania-based opposition Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) group, said on Sunday that they put photos of the leaders of the group Massoud and Maryam Rajavi on the organization’s website.

The website of the organization, run under the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, is down at the moment, therefore it is not clear for how long it was displaying photos of the MEK leaders and slogans in support for the group. 

The hacktivist group said that it has also disabled six websites and systems, 44 servers and two internal administrative systems of the state organization. 

In a video released by the hackers, they claimed they have obtained 200,000 documents, including letters and directives from secret correspondence with the president’s office, identities of the organization’s employees abroad, and list of the incomes of its personnel. 

In early June, the group hacked into and deactivated over 5,000 surveillance cameras and 150 websites and online services of Tehran Municipality.

Last week, a hacking group called Predatory Sparrow targeted three of Iran’s major steel plants by a cyberattack, purportedly forcing one of them to halt production.

The Sunday cyberattack came a few days after Israel -- which is widely believed to have waged cyber war against Iran's nuclear facilities and other infrastructure -- confirmed that an Iranian hacker group has recently targeted several travel booking sites of an Israeli company and stolen personal information of more than 300,000 Israelis.

Mansour Haqiqatpur, a self-styled “principlist” or hardliner told ILNA that " We should allow people's hatred of Israel to manifest itself."

He added, “Whether we make agreements or not, our contradictions with Israel will remain in place. We certainly had problems with them and will continue to have,” the former member of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds (Qods) Force, turned politician said.

But what reflected the true thinking of hardliners in Iran, loyal to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his ideology was Haqiqatpur’s statement that “If one day we come to feel we have no problems with Israel, that day will signify the decline of the Islamic Republic.”

Since its establishment in 1979, the clerical regime in Iran has kept one policy consistent, and that is its anti-Israel and anti-US ideology, the politician’s statement shows. On many occasions, Iranian officials have called for Israel’s destruction and have marshalled huge resources to build a network of militant allies and proxies to threaten the Jewish state. However, the domestic rationale for this policy is often not understood.

Khamenei almost in every one of his 1,800 speeches since assuming power in 1989 has used the word “the enemy”, meaning first Israel and then the United States. The concept of permanently facing an enemy or enemies justifies the perpetuation of an authoritarian political system that now increasingly resembles a totalitarian regime.

Haqiqatpur went on to say that “We should be ready for an all-out confrontation with soft power, semi hard power and hard power with Israel. The leader of the revolution [Khamenei] has announced a date for Israel’s fall and we should try to meet that deadline.”

A few years ago, Khamenei said Israel must be destroyed in 25 years and the government even set up a countdown clock in Tehran. Many Iranian make fun of the anti-Israel rhetoric and the clock, but the regime remains serious in repeating its threat.

Asked about what the Islamic Republic should do at this point, the former IRGC officer said that everyone should know Iran is in a cyberwar with Israel and all entities and institutions should reinforce their cyber defenses.

Israel is believed to have started a covert war against the Islamic Republic that intensified in July 2020 with a mysterious attack on its top=secret nuclear facility in Natanz where an explosion destroyed a building producing uranium enrichment centrifuges.

The attacks continued with the highly complex assassination of Iran’s top nuclear operative Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in November 2020, using a remote-controlled heavy gun near Tehran.

Mysterious attacks have continued against nuclear and other sensitive targets. Since May several Revolutionary Guard officials have been killed ot died mysteriously in Iran, prompting officials to accuse Israel of running a covert campaign.

This has led to an unprecedented reshuffling and firing of top-level intelligence officials, including the chief of a special force protecting Khamenei and his family. Top leaders have admitted that Israel has infiltrated Iranian government institutions and have vowed to retaliate by cyberwar and any other means.

Texas Republican representative Randy Weber released a video on his twitter account on Saturday, calling on his fellow congresspeople from both sides of the aisle to raise their voices against the “so-called” arrangement and “do everything to stop appeasing the ayatollahs.” 

“I’m shocked to find out Belgian government has cut a deal with world’s top state-sponsor of terror and plans to send Iranian terrorists back to Iran to plot more terroristic acts,” he said, warning that it will “make Europe and the Americas unsafe and ripe for more terrorism at the hands of the Iranian regime.”

“I want to urge the president of Belgian Chamber of Representatives and all parliamentarians to reject any language in the bill that will allow terrorists to go back to their terrorist nest,” Weber said, adding that if approved, this “absurd” and “shameful” deal will “turn Belgium into a safe haven for the mullahs’ terrorism.”

The draft law will potentially result in sending back Iranian diplomat Asadollah Assadi, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for masterminding a failed terrorist attack in Europe.

An informed source told Iran International that two Belgian citizens are currently in prison in Iran. One of the two is apparently an Iranian-Belgian professor of Louvain University. It is not clear who the other Belgian is.

In an interview with British magazine The Spectator published on Saturday, Kissinger, who is a former US Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, added that any modification in the 2015 accord “makes it apparently more tolerable to the adversary." 

He noted that if such a deal is reached, the situation of the region might become “much more explosive” because “particularly Israel – Iran’s chief enemy – but also Egypt and Saudi Arabia – whom they see as principal competitors – were going to be driven into reactions.”

Saying that there is really “no alternative to the elimination of an Iranian nuclear force,” Kissinger emphasized that there is “no way you can have peace in the Middle East with nuclear weapons in Iran, because before that happens, there is a high danger of pre-emption by Israel, because Israel cannot wait for deterrents. It can afford only one blow on itself. That is the inherent problem of the crisis.”

“I was extremely doubtful about the original nuclear agreement. I thought Iran’s promises would be very difficult to verify, and that the talks really created a pattern in which the nuclear build-up might have been slowed down a little but made more inevitable,” he said. 

Iran’s media is filled with contradictory comments on the outcome of indirect talks with Washington in Qatar this week over the fate of the Vienna negotiations, which have been stalled for months.