Tehran – The man nominated on Thursday to serve as Iran’s next defense minister is wanted by the international police agency, Interpol, in connection with the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
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Ahmad Vahidi is one of five Iranians wanted for their role in planning the July 1994 attack, which killed 85 people.
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nominated Vahidi and 14 other men and women to serve in his cabinet. Those nominees must now be approved by lawmakers.
Analysts say that Vahidi’s nomination was likely to further chill relations between Iran and the international community, especially Israel, reports the Washington Times.
“His reputed intimate involvement in various acts of terrorism, particularly against Argentina and the United States, makes his selection especially flagrant. This does not look like an unclenched fist,” Kenneth Piernick, a former chief of the FBI’s Iran-Hezbollah unit, told the daily.
Vahidi, who served as Iran’s deputy defense minister during Ahmadinejad’s first term, is also suspected of involvement in a 1996 attack on the US Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia.
He was also a commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps elite Qods Force, which was named a “specially designated global terrorist” by the US Treasury Department in October 2007.
Kenneth Katzman, a senior analyst on Iran and Iraq at the Washington-based Congressional Research Service, said that Vahidi’s selection “send a very strong signal that Ahmadinejad plans to continue, and maybe even accelerate, Iran’s material support for pro-Iranian parties and militias in the region
Heh, this is completely unsurprising. A’jad was one of the “students” who orchestrated the 1979 overthrow of the Shah and the seizing of 52 American hostages, so is it any wonder he would nominate another terrorist to his cabinet?
Yawn.