Paris, 19 October 2022

Gen. Ahmed Naser Al-Raisi
President of INTERPOL
Lyon, France

Mr President,

On behalf of the 400,000 members of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre worldwide, we call on INTERPOL to invoke its “Red Notice” applied to Mohsen Rezaee, charged by Argentina for the murder of 85 and wounding of over 300 in the 1994 bombing of the Buenos Aires AMIA Jewish Centre. This represents the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

Rezaee – now Vice-President of Iran for Economic Affairs – from 1980 to 1997, was commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC, a.k.a. Pasdaran), the infamously ideologized armed force that implements the Iranian regime’s policies, including clandestine operations overseas.

He is accused as one of the five Iranians who planned, ordered and organized the execution of the AMIA massacre.

To quote INTERPOL, Red Notices are issued “to alert all police forces of internationally wanted fugitives... to help bring them to justice, sometimes many years after the original crime was committed”... adding, “our Response Team can be deployed anywhere in the world within 12 to 24 hours.”

We thus urge INTERPOL to call upon Qatar to detain Mohsen Rezaee for immediate arrest and extradition to Argentina. Waiting for him are a Prosecutor, a Judge and the Argentine Foreign Ministry.

In 2018, our Centre played out in the British Parliament a similar scenario, in the case one of the perpetrators were to arrive in the United Kingdom.

On that occasion, coinciding with the memorial of the bombing, the speakers included Argentine Ambassador to Britain, a survivor of the terror attack, our Latin American Director and a British QC expert on extradition and universal jurisdiction.

Literally, a few days before the opening in Doha of the World Football Cup, INTERPOL can give Qatar the opportunity to detain Mohsen Rezaee. His extradition would finally bring some closure to the families of the victims.

Qatar can truly be the host of “the Beautiful Game” or chose to be the refuge of a criminal terrorist, wanted by international justice.

Most respectfully,

Dr Shimon Samuels
Director for International Relations
Simon Wiesenthal Centre

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For further information, contact Shimon Samuels at csweurope@gmail.com
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