Zebari’s false claims meant to wash blood off al-Maliki’s hands

NCRI – While the Iranian Resistance on Tuesday revealed a top-secret operational command document regarding the massacre of Camp Ashraf residents on the order of Nuri al-Maliki signed by the Commander of Iraq’s 5th Division in various capitals of the world, Iraq’s Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari in an interview with BBC News ”Hardtalk” tried to wash the blood off al-Maliki’s hands by repeating the preposterous claims of the Iranian regime and Maliki’s spokespersons that the PMOI members killed themselves. He said: “This is a very suspicious incident actually. We are willing to investigate because the way these people have been killed, they have been killed in a certain specific way, not by the Iraqi security forces as such…”

Zebari’s preposterous claim comes while US forces and US embassy representatives in Baghdad as well as a UN team and their medical teams in their visit to the camp on 10 and 13 April examined all the dead and took photographs and films and issued official positions on the Iraqi forces’ crimes.

Following the international attention to this great crime against humanity, the al-Maliki government, which initially denied killing Ashraf residents, accepted that three people had been killed in accidental collisions with vehicles. (Ali Gheydan, commander of Iraq’s ground forces, Alhurra television, 9 April 2011)

Following statements issued by the US State Department, European Union, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Amnesty International, Senator John Kerry, Senator Carl Levin and many other Congressmen and Senators in the US as well as Members of Parliament in the UK and Europe, al-Maliki’s spokespersons in a brazen lie claimed that a further 31 other people killed in Ashraf “were shot execution-style”. (Saad al-Matalabi, political adviser to al-Maliki, Christian Science Monitor, 17 April 2011)

On the other hand, over the past 28 months, Zebari and his ministry have not issued a single visa for journalists, lawyers, Parliamentarians, and relatives of Ashraf residents from five continents who wish to go to Iraq to visit Camp Ashraf. This is while Zebari is clearly aware that agents of the terrorist Qods Force and the Iranian regime’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security are continuously travelling between Tehran and Baghdad and have installed 240 loudspeakers around the perimeter of the camp.

The Iranian Resistance condemns Zebari’s false claims and the inhumane attitude of his ministry in preventing visits by relatives, lawyers and Parliamentarians to Iraq and Camp Ashraf and advises Zebari not to further involve himself in this great crime against humanity and crime against the international community in Ashraf and its legal consequences.

We urge Zebari to personally visit Camp Ashraf along with a delegation of UK Parliamentarians and a specialist team from Doctors Without Borders to see up close the corpses of the 34 martyred residents and talk directly with 225 others who were shot or targeted with grenades.

Hossein Abedini
UK representative office of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
20 April 2011