Interior minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar – a veteran of Iranian regime’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – is due to be in Austria for Tuesday’s Ministerial Conference of the Paris Pact Partners on Combating Illicit Traffic.
Mohammad-Najjar has committed a catalogue of terrorist and criminal activities as he has risen through the ranks of the mullahs’ ruling dictatorship.
In 1983, he was a senior commander in the Revolutionary Guards in charge of the expeditionary force in Lebanon, where he has plotted a suicide attack on a US Marine barracks at Beirut airport at dawn on October 23.
The bomber and his accomplices had hijacked a water delivery truck and sent another one loaded with explosives in its place.
The driver then smashed through barbed wire fences and a security gate and slammed into a four-story barracks packed with sleeping soldiers, killing 400 of them and leaving an eight-feet
deep crater.
Four years later in July 1987, Iran’s then Minister of Revolutionary Guards, Mohsen Rafiqdoost, was quoted as saying in the Tehran daily Ressalat: “Both the TNT and the ideology which in one blast sent to hell 400 officers, NCOs, and soldiers at the Marines headquarters were provided by Iran.”
In 1994, a 320mm super gun was discovered at the Belgian port of Antwerp. It had been built by the IRGC’s military industry then headed Najjar as the current Defense Minister.
The gun was destined to be moved to France where it was to be used against the headquarters of the NCRI in Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, according to reports by the authorities.
A similar gun was discovered in 1995 in Baghdad before it was used in an operation against the office of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) in Baghdad.
Then when Mohammad-Najjar was defence minister in 2005, he also admitted that one of the key projects of the MODAFL – the Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics – was the manufacture of Shahab-3 missiles.
In September 2010, the United States sanctioned Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar for human rights abuses. According to the U.S. Department of State, while Najjar was Deputy Commander of Armed Forces, “he was in charge of the government response to protests on Ashura, one of the holiest days in Shia Islam, which in 2009 coincided with December 27, 2009. State media reported 37 dead and hundreds arrested.
Mustafa Mohammad-Najar is one of the key elements responsible for the suppression inside Iran and one of the commanders of the terrorist operations outside Iran.
He has played an important role in advancing the development of the regimes’ weapons of mass destruction.