The Committee on Security and Counterterrorism of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) makes public the enlightening letter by a former operative of the Iranian Regime’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) who resides in Albania to the United Nations Secretary-General. Copies of this letter have been sent to the UN High Commissioners for Human Rights and Refugees, the Secretary-General of Amnesty International, the International Federation of Human Rights, the Friends of a Free Iran group in the European Parliament, as well as the Minister of Interior and the General Director of the State Police in Albania, as well as the NCRI’s Security and Counterterrorism Committee.
The letter unveils and documents the details of a new and shocking campaign of demonization as well as espionage and terrorism against the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK). The author has emphasized that he is prepared to testify and prove his revelations with ample documents and evidence before any court or impartial authority.
The author writes, “My name is Hadi Sani-Khani and I am 41 years old. I left Iran for Turkey in 2003 and then went to Iraq and joined the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK)) in Camp Ashraf and was subsequently relocated to Camp Liberty in Iraq. In September 2016, the PMOI facilitated my relocation to Albania. Two months later in November 2016, because I could not continue the struggle, I decided to quit the ranks of the PMOI and went the office of the UN Refugee Agency in Tirana. Two weeks later, I went to the Iranian embassy in Tirana. For four years I fell into a trap set by the Iranian regime’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) and its Iranian embassy in Albania. During this period, I began to collaborate with official agents of the MOIS in the Embassy in Albania, such as Fereidoun Zandi Ali-Abadi and notorious MOIS agents, including Ebrahim and Massoud Khodabandeh, Gholamreza Shekari and Ehsan Bidi and later Hassan Heyrani. They used me in demonization, espionage, intelligence gathering, and reconnoitering schemes to carry out terrorist actions against the PMOI.”
The letter adds, “Zandi insisted that I should find out and gather information about the whereabouts of Mrs. (Maryam) Rajavi and senior PMOI officials. He was specifically interested in knowing where they stayed and how many bodyguards they had. Two other agents, Manouchehr Abdi and Sa’adollah Seifi assisted me in this assignment…. In March 2016, I was tasked to lead a network of a group of agents. The main responsibility of this group was to write articles against the PMOI. The Khodabandeh brothers and Zandi decided the topics and provided talking points and briefs for these articles… These agents were required to set up at least one account on Facebook and one on Instagram, and to write and publish 12 articles against the Mojahedin every month, and to continuously relay and reprint topics and content identified by the embassy or the Ministry of Intelligence.”
The letter also provides information on the amounts and methods of payments to these operative and their utilization on YouTube TV channels such as Mardom TV. It reveals (the MOIS) use of journalists, such as a reporter from Der Spiegel in 2018) to produce anti-PMOI stories, as well as directives to local agents, including Olsi Jazexhi (posing as a journalist who had studied in Malaysia)
and Gjergji Thanasi (who frequently travelled to Iran), verifying the accuracy of the statements issued by the Iranian Resistance in this respect.
Considering the importance of the information in this letter especially after a court in Antwerp, Belgium revealed the modus operandi of the MOIS in Europe, the NCRI’s Security and Counterterrorism Committee recommends all Iranian compatriots to carefully read it.
Closing down the mullahs’ embassies in Albania and other European countries as well the prosecution and expulsion of the agents and operatives of the MOIS, the IRGC, and the Quds Force are indispensable to countering the Iranian regime’s terrorism and espionage and preventing the MOIS from using diplomatic sites and capabilities.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI)
Security and Counterterrorism Committee
February 17, 2021
Letter by Hadi Sani-Khani to UN Secretary-General
February 14, 2021
The Honorable António Guterres,
United Nations Secretary-General
The United Nations
New York, NY 10017
Excellency,
My name is Hadi Sani-Khani and I am 41 years old. I left Iran for Turkey in 2003 and then went to Iraq and joined the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK)) in Camp Ashraf and was subsequently relocated to Camp Liberty in Iraq. In September 2016, the PMOI facilitated my relocation to Albania. Two months later in November 2016, because I could not continue the struggle, I decided to quit the ranks of the PMOI and went the office of the UN Refugee Agency in Tirana. Two weeks later, I went to the Iranian embassy in Tirana. For four years I fell into a trap set by the Iranian regime’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) and its Iranian embassy in Albania. During this period, I began to collaborate with official agents of the MOIS in the Embassy in Albania, such as Fereidoun Zandi Ali-Abadi and notorious MOIS agents, including Ebrahim and Massoud Khodabandeh, Gholamreza Shekari and Ehsan Bidi and later Hassan Heyrani. They used me in demonization, espionage, intelligence gathering, and reconnoitering schemes to carry out terrorist actions against the PMOI.
From the onset, I was witness to the criminal activities perpetrated by the embassy’s officials and agents of the MOIS. I was not at ease with my conscience for being part of these activities. Nevertheless, because of my predicament it was extremely difficult for me to part ways with those agents. I was also fearful of being eliminated in view of the fact that they had threatened me. But, the November 2019 uprising and the slaughter of young protesters was the last straw and prompted me to leave this criminal and Mafia-type gang and end all my contact with this sinister network no matter what the cost. I want to apologize to the PMOI and Iranian refugees in Albania and want to make amends for my actions by exposing what I have been witness to in previous years.
To this end, below I will bring to your attention, albeit briefly, parts of the activities in which I participated or was personally witness to with the objective of demonizing, spying and collecting intelligence on the PMOI. I request that you use your good offices so that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights takes appropriate and necessary steps to protect the dignity and the rights of genuine refugees, and not agents of the Iranian regime who do not deserve such rights. I take full responsibility for everything in the foregoing pages and am prepared to testify before any court or impartial authority and provide them with the details as well as sufficient evidence and documents.
1. I left the PMOI in November 9, 2016 to pursue my personal life, and introduced myself to the UNHCR in Tirana. I asked the PMOI for financial support in the same month of November, to which they agreed and provided such support. But this support ended on 10th April 2017, when they found out that I am in contact with the Iranian regime’s embassy.
2. Four days after I left the PMOI, I received a phone call from Ebrahim Khodabandeh in Tehran, who congratulated me for leaving the PMOI. He is in charge of the Nejat association, which is tied to the regime’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). Immediately after, his brother Masoud Khodabandeh (agent of the MOIS based in the UK) contacted me. These two brothers suggested that I should go to the Iranian regime’s embassy in Tirana. About two weeks after, I visited the embassy. There, I told them that I wanted to go back to Iran. The embassy conditioned my return to Iran upon my cooperation with the officers and agents of the Ministry of Intelligence.
After my first visit to the embassy, Ebrahim Khodabandeh from Tehran once again contacted me, this time on my Facebook messenger: “I was informed that you have visited the embassy. You can be a lot of help. You can begin by writing articles and forward them to me as well, so we can publish them on our Nejat website”. In response to the embassy’s condition, I wrote articles against the PMOI for some time under the pseudonyms of “Zeinal Shahidi” and “Saeid Zamani”. The Khodabandeh brothers subsequently published these articles on the MOIS websites. I was paid 500 euros a month by the embassy to carry out what they instructed me to do.
3. The first person to whom I spoke in the embassy introduced himself as Haji. I later found out that his real name was Fereidoun Zandi Aliabadi, and that he was the head of the intelligence station of the regime and worked under the title of the first attaché in the embassy. I found out through the agents, that Fereidoun Zandi had formed a network of agents against the PMOI since 2014 in close cooperation with the head of the intelligence station of the regime in Iraq whose nom de guerre was Sajjad. He usually used the whatapp application with the following number: 0035569862451. He occasionally also used Viber. He regularly shared information with Sajjad about those who had left the PMOI and now were collaborating with the regime. At times, Sajjad would also directly contact these individuals in Albania. He used the number 009647708907998 when he was in Iraq and used 00989357134401 whenever he was in Iran when he contacted agents of this network in Albania. In December 2017, Mostafa Roudaki replaced Fereidoun Zandi in Albania. Roudaki was expelled together with the regime’s ambassador to Albania by the Albanian government as a persona non grata, several months after planning a terrorist attack against the PMOI in March 2018.
4. In the spring of 2017, I was ordered by Zandi to gather information including videos and pictures from different locations where the PMOI members lived. I provided him with over 300 pictures and several videos from the PMOI locations. Zandi insisted that I should find out and gather information about the whereabouts of Mrs. Maryam Rajavi and senior PMOI officials. He was specifically interested in knowing where they stayed and how many bodyguards they had. Two other agents, Manouchehr Abdi and Sa’adollah Seifi, assisted me in this intelligence gathering operation.
5. In March 2017, I was tasked to lead a network of some agents. The main responsibility of this group was to write articles against the PMOI. The Khodabandeh brothers and Zandi would select and decide the main topics and talking points for these articles. I would then send the articles written by the agents to be published on MOIS-affiliated websites like the Nejat Association, Faragh website, Rah-e-No’e Site, Iran Interlink (run by Masoud Khodabandeh)- Kanoon Ava (run by Ali-akbar Rastgoo in Germany) – the “Sects” in Paris. I also sent them to agents like Mohammad Karami and others.
6. One of the missions that Zandi gave us was to attract people who have more experience in the organization and get more information about the PMOI. In this regard, the embassy used a defector named “Hadi Nasseri Moghaddam” to contact one of the defectors who had more experience in the PMOI and to arrange for him to meet with Zandi. Hadi Nasseri wrote articles against the PMOI under the pseudonym “Akbar Hassani”. After several years of being an agent and proving his allegiance, I heard that on October 14, 2020, Nasseri went to Iran through Bosnia, and in December 2020, websites of the Ministry of Intelligence published his interviews and photos in Iran.
7. The regime’s mercenaries in Albania are divided into two groups. In the first group are those who are openly in contact with the embassy and must prove their allegiance to the Ministry of Intelligence so that they can gain permission to go to Iran. Some of these people include Azim Mish Mast, Manouchehr Abdi, Saadollah Seifi, Gholam Ali Mirzaei, Mousa Damroudi, Parviz Heidarzadeh, Rahman Mohammadian and Ali Hajari. These people received 500 euros a month from the embassy. According to the embassy’s orders, these mercenaries are required to create at least one account on Facebook and Instagram, and to produce and publish 12 articles against the PMOI every month, and to continuously relay and republish topics and content identified by the embassy or the Ministry of Intelligence.
The second group of people work secretly for the embassy and the regime’s intelligence station to spy and gather information about and identify PMOI centers. These mercenaries are paid 300 euros a month and will be paid more if they do more work. People like Raouf Faramarzi, Mohammad Tourang, Baqer Mohammadi, Reza Mazegi, Khalil Ansarian, Mansour Brahoui and others were in this group.
Some mercenaries, such as Mohammad Tourang, Raouf Faramarzi, and Hadi Nasseri, pretended to oppose the regime. And after a while, they went to Iran without informing even their closest friends. Baqer Mohammadi, Reza Mazegi, Khalil Ansarian, and Mansour Brahoui worked secretly for the regime’s embassy while also receiving monetary allowances from the PMOI. But when the PMOI learned of their secret relationship with the embassy, they cut off their aid.
8. For a while, the money for a number of the mercenaries was given to me either at the embassy or in public commercial stores whose security conditions were previously checked. I then distributed the money among the agents. The total amount was at least 15,000 euros per month. In April 2017, Zandi asked me to go to the Tag Business Complex to get the monthly funds for the people in the network. He asked me to choose a place in the complex in advance that did not have cameras and was suitable for security reasons. We used the pretext of getting coffee to go into the cafe in front of the ZARA store, where he handed me 15,000 euros in an envelope. He also gave me an envelope containing 80 CDs which he had brought with him. Together we entered the ZARA store and we each picked up a shirt and went to the fitting rooms. There, Zandi put the CDs in my bag. These CDs included the Ministry of Intelligence’s propaganda against the PMOI leadership. For a long time, my job was to mail out these CDs. Due to the fact that sending them at once would appear suspicious, I posted 10 CDs each time for parliamentarians, journalists, and so on. In the course of doing this work, I found out that Ali Akbar Rastgoo (a mercenary of the Ministry of Intelligence in Germany) and other mercenaries are also involved in distributing these CDs or similar ones against the Mojahedin in different countries. I had to report every day to Rastgoo on how many CDs I had sent out and to whom. While doing this, it became clear that Massoud Khodabandeh in the UK, Ali Rastgoo in Germany and Ebrahim Khodabandeh in Iran were in direct contact with the regime’s embassy in Albania and were coordinating their activities against the PMOI in Albania.
9. The names, missions and telephone numbers of some of the mercenaries in contact with the Ministry of Intelligence through the Embassy of the Iranian regime in Albania are as follows:
- Gholamreza Shekari has been in contact with the embassy in Albania since about 2016. He used 00355699347575 phone number to contact Iran and the embassy of the regime. He is also connected to the Ministry of Intelligence inside Iran through his sister Maria. Maria received about two million tomans a month from the Ministry of Intelligence. Gholamreza Shekari was arrested and imprisoned in Albania in September 2020 for conducting illegal activities.
- Abdol Rahman Mohammadian has been cooperating with the Ministry of Intelligence through the embassy since 2017, and his telephone number was 00355697839580.
- Ali Hajari has been in contact with the Ministry of Intelligence since 2018. His sister Shahin Hajari and his brother Mahmoud Hajari are Ministry of Intelligence agents in Iran. His telephone number was 00355698777978.
- Malek Beit Mashal started his connection with the embassy and the Ministry of Intelligence since the latter part of 2017, and began writing and publishing articles and lies against the PMOI. His telephone number was 00355693330143.
- Hassan Shahbaz was recruited by the Ministry of Intelligence at the embassy since 2018. His task is to write articles and to continue the demonization campaign on Facebook and websites. His telephone number was 00355699744576.
- Parviz Heidarzadeh has been in contact with the Ministry of Intelligence since the latter part of 2017. His mission is to conduct interviews and write articles against the PMOI and to liaise with the Nejat Association in the Ministry of Intelligence. His telephone number is 00355697792728.
- Reza Eslami established contact in 2017 and his phone number is 00355692102896.
- Mousa Damroudi has been serving the regime since 2018. He is actively in contact with Mardom TV and an intelligence agent named Parsa Sorbi. Damroudi’s phone number was 00355695622499.
- Ehsan Bidi is one of the regime’s first intelligence agents in Albania. He surrendered himself to Iraqi forces from Camp Liberty in 2012 and was transferred to the Mohajer Hotel in Baghdad, which was under the control of Sajjad, the head of the regime’s Ministry of Intelligence station in Iraq. He was transferred to Albania in October 2013 with an Iranian passport. He got in contact with Zandi and received 1,000 euros a month from the embassy. Ehsan Bidi’s phone number was 00355692592439.
10. In February 2019, because I was sick and tired of cooperating with the regime, I decided to leave Albania. But I was arrested in Croatia and forced to return to Albania. The Iranian regime’s embassy reprimanded me and threatened me and my family. They asked me to give interviews with my real name against the PMOI, which were widely published on the websites of the Ministry of Intelligence. From that date on, the embassy removed me as the head of the network and handed the role over to Hassan Heyrani instead.
11. Hassan Heyrani was expelled from the PMOI in April 2018 due to intelligence and security suspicions. He was quickly placed in the regime’s spy network in Albania. After the expulsion of the ambassador and head of the regime’s intelligence station in Albania in December 2018, Hassan Heyrani was in direct contact with the Ministry of Intelligence in Tehran. He uses multiple telephone numbers to communicate with mercenaries, the Ministry of Intelligence and the embassy. One of these phone numbers was 00355699516435. Heyrani receives a fixed monthly salary of 1,500 euros from the Ministry of Intelligence. Heyrani receives a steady stipend of 1,500 euros a month from the Ministry of Intelligence. In addition to this, he receives an extra 1,500 euros a month from the Ministry of Intelligence in order to cover the expenses of running a coffee shop that the Ministry of Intelligence has ordered him to set up as a hangout location for its agents. If he has any other expenses, he would provide the bill to the Ministry of Intelligence, which would pay him the money.
12. In December 2018 after the expulsion of Mostafa Roudaki, the head of the Iranian regime’s intelligence station, from Albania, Hassan Heyrani was ordered to set up a business location as a cover for the rendezvous and communications among the regime’s agents. In October 2019, with the help of the embassy, Heyrani set up a “café” named “Frank” in the Frezco district of Tirana. All costs of setting up and operating this cafe, including the monthly rent of the place, which is 500 euros, are paid by the Ministry of Intelligence. After the expulsion of the second series of regime diplomats from Albania in January 2020, the mercenaries’ payments came directly from Iran. Each month, the Ministry of Intelligence sent between 20,000 and 25,000 euros to Hassan Heyrani through Western Union to pay the mercenaries. Some of the money was sent through Turkey, Iraq or Kuwait.
13. In 2017, Zandi told me via chat that they want to create a strong website that also publishes content in Albanian. He asked me to estimate the cost of establishing and running such a website. I gave this estimate with the help of one of the defectors, but Zandi did not approve it. Instead, they launched the “Survivors in Albania” website. This site is operated by Ali Akbar Rastgoo, Ministry of Intelligence agent in Germany, and is registered in Karlsruhe, Germany (documents available). In addition to Rastgoo, mercenaries such as Mohammad Karami and Mohammad Hossein Sobhani work for this site.
14. The “Survivors in Albania” website and other sites that operate against the PMOI, under the direct supervision of the Ministry of Intelligence, are run by mercenaries such as Mohammad Karami, Mohammad Hossein Sobhani, Ali Akbar Rastgoo, and Massoud Khodabandeh. They specify the subject and the focus of the articles and the mercenaries in Albania produce the writings. Those who run the websites receive far greater salaries than other mercenaries from the Ministry of Intelligence.
15. Zandi told me that Parsa Sorbi, the director of the Internet TV “Mardom TV”, is one of us and implements the tasks that we specify for him through Rastgoo and Mohammad Karami. The Ministry of Intelligence pays Sorbi’s salary through Rastgoo. The regime’s embassy in Tirana arranged mercenary interviews with this television. Karami and Rastgoo gave the names of the mercenaries instructed by the embassy to Sorbi, along with the questions, a week in advance. Questions and answers were also given to the agent to memorize for the day of the interview. Sorbi advertised these interviews ahead of time. In these interviews, everything, even the words, were determined by agents of the Ministry of Intelligence, and the mercenaries would say all those things against the PMOI.
16. One of the conditions set by the Ministry of Intelligence for agreeing to return a mercenary to Iran was for the agent to conduct interviews with Sorbi. The embassy of the regime wanted me to brief and prepare Manouchehr Abdi, and the ministry was happy with the results. After that, they agreed to Abdi’s return to Iran. After this interview, Zandi left the responsibility of selecting the defectors to have interviews with Sorbi to Abdi, and he did this in association with Mohammad Karami and Ali Akbar Rastgoo until he left for Iran. Given that the number of people who were openly willing to become intelligence agents was not large, we had to send each person several times for an interview. Unfortunately, I myself did an interview with this TV in February 2019. After the interview, the ministry called me and expressed their satisfaction with the interview. The regime embassy in Albania calculated that an interview with Sorbi was worth more than several articles a month, and this was also taken into account in the payments to mercenaries. Intelligence officers at the embassy increased monthly payments to defectors in order to encourage TV interviews, and they even told me that someone who interviews with Sorbi once or twice a month is worth more than someone who writes 12 articles on the site.
17. On June 12, 2020, Heyrani had an interview with Sorbi. The subject of the interview was the correspondence between families of PMOI members and the Albanian government regarding meetings with Ashraf members in Albania. That same morning, an intelligence officer from Tehran called Heyrani, who was in the cafe, and briefed him. Hassan Heyrani wrote down the talking points in order to repeat them during the interview with Sorbi.
18. The topics that the embassy and the ministry sent to be used for questions and answers for interviews with Sorbi, or topics for writing articles on the websites of the Ministry of Intelligence, included the following: torture of dissidents, lack of freedom in PMOI relations, brainwashing, confessions about sexual topics and thoughts, cutting ties with the outside world, forced divorces, suspected killings within the PMOI, killing of Kurds and Shiites in Iraq, getting money from the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia, and the idea that they took their nuclear information from Israel and have no base or popular support in Iran.
19. I had been in the ranks of the PMOI for about 14 years and knew that not a single word of these utterances was true, and this constant lying became one of the drivers of my psychological torment and bad conscience. Especially since I was the head of the network and coordinating communications among mercenaries, I felt like I was committing a great sin. As a living witness, I can testify in any court that these interviews and articles all stem from the designs and plans of the Ministry of Intelligence. I witnessed all these lies being dictated by the Ministry to the mercenaries, and they repeated them on Ministry of Intelligence-made websites and televisions.
20. Massoud Khodabandeh and his wife Ann Singleon Khodabaneh played the main role in briefing and sending reporters to Albania and helping them to arrange interviews with the agents. He recruited the services of locals like Olsi Yazeji for these activities. Khodabandeh put me in touch with Olsi Jazexhi.
21. In November 2017, Zandi sent me a message that Anne Singleton has arrived in Tirana and that I should take the agents to meet her so they can recount in detail the stories of torture, lack of freedom and forced marriages in the PMOI. I arranged a meeting between Anne Singleton and a group including Manouchehr Abdi, Sa’adollah Seifi, Hadi Nasseri Moghaddam, Gholamreza Shekari and some others at the restaurant in the Topfoni shopping center. Anne Singleton took pictures with some of them whose contacts with the embassy were known, and subsequently published them in the MOIS affiliated websites. Anne Singleton encouraged them to come forward with more revelations against the PMOI. She later met separately with Ehsan Bidi and took pictures with him. Singleton stayed in International Hotel for 4 days and Olsi Jazexhi’s wife accompanied her during her stay.
22. In July 2018, the Ministry of Intelligence sent Mostafa Mohammadi along with his wife to Albania for three months so he could engage in activities against the PMOI. The embassy instructed Heyrani to assist Mohammadi during their stay. The embassy provided him with a lawyer. Mostafa Mohammadi is a known agent with close relations with the MOIS in Iran and Canada. During his stay in Albania, he was in regular and close contact with Masoud Khodabandeh. The embassy paid for all their expenses in cash during their several-months-long stay in Albania, including their lawyer’s fee, which according to Heyrani exceeded 30,000 Euros.
23. In September 2018, we were informed by the embassy that a reporter from the German paper Der Spiegel is set to visit Albania and we were asked to be perpared to meet with the reporter for interviews. The reporter was a 30-yea- old woman named Louisa Homerish. I later found out that she studied Islamic studies in Tehran university in 2016 and 2017 and had contacts with the paramilitary Basij members as well. Together with a group of other agents who had previously defected from the PMOI, we met the Der Spiegel reporter in a restaurant in Ramsa district in Zagozi square. Each of us then told her lies about the PMOI which we had been given in preparation of the meeting. I was in contact with this reporter for the next three months. Occasionally she asked me questions about the PMOI which I then raised with the embassy and provided her the response I received.
Der Spiegel published the story as “prisoners of rebellion” on 16th February 2019. Interestingly, part of this report had already been published two-and-a-half months prior, on November 26, 2018, as an interview with Gholamreza Shekari in the website of the “Kermanshah Branch of the Nejat Association” under the title of “the tragic story of a defector”.
24. On September 3, 2020, on the anniversary of the Iran-Iraq war, Masoud Khodabandeh informed us that he had arranged for Gholamali Mirzaei, who was a POW, to conduct an interview with the BBC TV. Mirzaei had been in contact with the embassy and MOIS since 2018. During this time, he wrote articles against the PMOI, conducted interviews, and acted as a translator for others. I, who at the time was living with Mirzaei in the same home, witnessed first-hand how Masoud Khodabandeh briefed him on September 4th before his interview about what to say. Khodabandeh emphasized that he should particularly say that he had been deceived in the POW Camp in Iraq and taken to Camp Ashraf without the Red Cross being informed and that he was not allowed to see his family for 30 years.
The MOIS had conditioned his return to Iran on this interview. Mirzaei lied and fabricated whatever stories he could during the interview in order to expedite his return to Iran. He used the telephone number 00355699516499 to contact the MOIS and other agents. Five months after this interview, MOIS-affiliated websites reported that Mirzaei had returned to Iran.
25. Local agents – I became acquainted with several of the local agents of the regime during the time I worked with the regime’s embassy and MOIS. Olsi Jazexhi, 42, who has studied public relations in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, was one of them. Under the guise of a journalist and columnist, he has worked for the Iranian regime for many years. When I was leading the network of agents, Olsi Jazexhi was in regular contact with me. He had his own website, IMPACT, and was the first outlet to publish interviews with Abdi and Bidi in September 2017.
In February 2018, Masoud Khodabandeh asked me to propose and prepare appropriate candidates for interviews with Albania’s Top Channel TV network. I later found out that the interviews were facilitated and arranged by Olsi Jazexhi beforehand through a female journalist. Khodabandeh would connect all the journalists he would send to Albania from abroad with Jazexhi, and thus advanced the MOIS plans through him.
Khodabandeh’s contacts with Olsi Jazexhi became more frequent after the expulsion of the regime’s ambassador from Albania. Olsi Jazexhi regularly met agents in Frank café shop owned by Hassan Heyrani, and conducted interviews with them there. His wife also worked as a lawyer for the agents.
Gjergji Thanasi is another Albanian agent of the Iranian regime. In addition to having constant contacts with the Iranian embassy in Albania and agent Khodabandeh, he regularly travels to Iran where he is briefed and receives directions for his activities against the PMOI. There are pictures of him visiting IRGC garrisons in Tehran and standing next to their armored vehicles. I met with and talked to Thanasi at Heyrani’s coffee shop several times. He worships money and in order to get more of it, he is prepared to do anything and everything to advance the clerical regime’s agenda. He was a regular visitor at the “coffee shop” and talked to the agents.
In a private conversation, Hassan Heyrani told me that Gjergji Thanasi and Olsi Jazexhi receive more than 1,000 euros per month from the regime. He said that he had personally put the money in envelopes and dropped it off at their homes. Gjergji’s writings were a carbon copy of previously published articles by Masoud Khodabandeh and the MOIS, which he published on his Facebook page and other social media platforms. In addition, these two facilitated all the criminal activities of Hassan Heyrani, Ehsan Bidi and Gholamreza Shekari.
I am prepared to provide more details and answer any further questions that you may have on this matter.
Respectfully,
Hadi Sani Khani
cc:
- The Honorable Michelle Bachelet, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights;
- The Honorable Filippo Grandi, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees;
- The Honorable Bledar Çuçi, Minister of Interior of the Republic Albania
- Ms. Julie Verhaar, Acting General Secretary General of the Amnesty International;
- Ms. Alice Mogwe, International Federation of Human Rights;
- Mr. Ardi Veliu, the General Director of State Police;
- The Honorable Milan Zver, MEP and Co-Chair of the Friends of Free Iran Intergroup in the European Parliament; and
- Security and Counterterrorism Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
