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Al-Monitor – Iran’s judiciary announced on Tuesday that its prosecutors had issued indictments against US President Joe Biden and over 50 other American officials over their supporting and hosting of a US-based exiled opposition group.
At a press briefing in Tehran, judiciary spokesperson Masoud Setayeshi said the list also included former presidents Donald Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush as well as secretaries of state Mike Pompeo, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice.
Setayeshi argued that the sitting and former officials had long supported the Kingdom Assembly of Iran, also known as Tondar, “a dissident group which promotes the restoration of the monarchy to Iran to replace the theocratic Islamic Republic.”
According to the Iranian judiciary, the indictments have been under review by a Tehran court, and the verdicts are forthcoming.
Iran has listed Tondar as a terrorist organization, claiming that it was behind a deadly 2008 bombing at a mosque in the southern city of Shiraz and has plotted a chain of similar attacks over the past decade. Tehran says the campaign has been supported by consecutive American administrations.
The dissident group’s leader, Jamshid Sharmahd, is a German-Iranian national and US resident. Iran announced his arrest in July 2020, but questions linger as to how he ended up in the country. Iranian authorities insist he was already inside the country upon capture, while his family maintains he was abducted from Tajikistan.
As part of an old practice commonly employed by Iran’s intelligence community, the dissident leader was brought before cameras to confess to his crimes and describe how he was assisted by American and Israeli intelligence agencies.
His controversial trial that landed him the death penalty drew fury from his family and Amnesty International slammed the “torture and other ill-treatment including through prolonged solitary confinement and denial of adequate healthcare” in his case. The ruling has also seen German officials actively engage with the Iranians to see it revoked. The push has fallen flat so far.
The indictment against the US leaders over their alleged backing of Sharmahd’s organization was reminiscent of a similar move by Iranian officials in the case of Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s highest-ranking officer who was killed in a January 2020 air strike on his convoy in Baghdad.
Promising revenge, Iranian authorities have vowed to bring former US President Donald Trump, who ordered the strike, to justice. They have issued indictments and arrest warrants and shared them with multiple bodies overseas, including Interpol.
On the third anniversary of Soleimani’s death, they announced additions to the list, which now includes many more Americans to be pursued for their varying levels of involvement in the assassination.
