The General Vanishes
The story behind the disappearance of Iranian general Ali Reza Asgari is finally told. Or is it?
UPDATE: Since this article was published yesterday, two developments have taken place.
1) Documentation blog referred to in this article has been hacked at Blogspot. Hacked URL is HERE. Page with documents still readable is HERE.
2) Indirectly related, Iran arrests top Iranian blogger: "Mehdi Boutorabi, the CEO of Persian Blog, a service company for Iranian bloggers, was arrested Sunday in his Tehran office, reports said Monday. Persian Blog was founded in 2001 by three students who two years later, during a crackdown by authorities on bloggers which led to many arrests, sold it to Boutorabi, a young entrepreneur close to Iran's reformist movement.... Officially, Boutorabi was arrested over the disappearance of former Pasdaran general, Alireza Asghari, though the connection between the two is unclear and has not been explained by authorities yet."
by Allison Kaplan Sommer, PJM Editor, Tel Aviv
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It’s been more than two months since General Ali Reza Asgari, former deputy Defense Minister of Iran vanished into thin air in Istanbul. There have been numerous reports in the press speculating on how and why it happened. But mostly there’s been silence.
Suddenly, a new account appeared on a Persian language blog, which, if true, would mean that Asgari defected from Iran and applied for political asylum to the United States of his own free will, and utterly de-legitimize repeated attempts by the Iranian regime to suggest that he was somehow kidnapped.
The account appeared promising. After all, it provided documentation — something all of the rumors, speculation and anonymously sourced news stories haven’t provided until now.
There’s just one problem - the organizations whose documents these are meant to be, say they are fake.
Either scenario is intriguing in its own right - either one in which the documents are real, the denials are a cover-up and Asgari’s defection is being kept top secret — not only by the U.S. government, but by the United Nations.
Or the alternative - that somebody, for some reason, had enough interest in promoting a false tale of a deal and defection with the U.S. to go to the trouble of whipping up these falsified papers and feeding them to the Persian-language blogosphere.
The documents come from the blog of Amir Farshad Ebrahimi, someone who claims to know Asgari and who himself defected from Iran in February of 2006. Ebrahimi received the documents which appeared to prove that Asgari sought refugee status from the United Nations, from a source he describes as “a friend who is 100 percent reliable: who works for an unnamed organization in Turkey.”
He says that he initiated the search. “I am very interested in this story because I knew Asgari personally,” Ebrahimi told Pajamas Media by telephone from his home in Turkey. “We served together in the Revolutionary Guards.”
Ebrahimi, who today describes himself a human rights activist, graduate student and author living in Turkey and Germany. According to his Wikipedia entry, he is a former Iranian soldier who served as the media attaché of the Iranian embassy in Beirut for two years from 1997 to 1998. He is a graduate student in Ankara. He is best-known for appearing in a controversial videotape in the year 2000, apparently confessing to a link between the hardline Iranian political and religious leaders and violent faction in Iran, revealing a number of their inside secrets, for which he was sentenced to two years in prison.
The following is a translation of the story as published in Ebrahimi’s Persian-language blog:
“After lengthy investigations from sources in Iran and Turkey, I hereby describe reveal the untold events of the Asgari affair:
Asgari, after staying for one day in a hotel called Arshan in Ankara, with the help of a Mr. Green, a security officer of the US embassy in Ankara, applied to the office of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees with a request political asylum.
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4 Comments
Steve-o:I hope the story is correct. There are so many twists and turns in these situations that one must be alert to every nuance. My reading above led to a qustion: Did Ebrahimi slip when he used the past tense to refer to Argasi?
“I am very interested in this story because I knew Asgari personally,”
May 14, 2007 - 12:00 pm Jabba the Tutt:Asgari’s no dummy. Why would any apply for policital asylum to the UN for Pete’s sake? Asgari knows that it’s the US that can protect him and his family. The US can place Asgari and his family in a comfortable life in the US. What can the UN do and why would they do it?
That’s the part that sounds really fishy to me.
May 14, 2007 - 12:27 pm M. Simon:Iran seems unhappy with his current location. Where ever that is.
May 14, 2007 - 2:01 pm Banafsheh:Amir Farshad Ebrahimi is someone who still has close ties to the regime and as SHADY as they come. This is NOT someone whose word ANYONE should bank on. He is still said to be loyal to certain members of the regime in Tehran.
May 16, 2007 - 10:06 am