Iranian protests the arrests outside the French embassy in London
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The group busted by the French was declared a terrorist organization by Clinton's State Department in 1997. The French government's action have pleased the Iranian Ayatollahs.
French Arrest 150 From Iranian Opposition Group
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
ARIS, June 17 — French authorities today arrested more than 150 members of a long-established armed Iranian opposition group, accused them of organizing terrorist acts, and seized $1.3 million in $100 bills.
The move against the Mujahedeen Khalq, or People's Mujahedeen, as the group is known, effectively shut down its operations in France, while the timing of the action seemed to send conciliatory signals to Iran.
Senior French officials insisted that the crackdown was not linked to events inside Iran. But it coincides with demands by the United Nations chief nuclear weapons inspector, the European Union, the United States and Russia that Iran allow international weapons inspectors to conduct more intrusive examinations of its nuclear sites.
It also coincides with a wave of student protest in Iran. On Sunday, President Bush encouraged antigovernment demonstrators in Iran to continue their protests for the sake of creating "a free Iran." Today in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell encouraged Iranians to protest for their rights, dismissing Tehran's charges that Washington was interfering in its domestic affairs.
Also today, a 38-year-old Iranian protester set himself on fire outside the French Embassy in London. Early news reports indicated that the man, whom a guard and police officers tried frantically to save, was angered by the French raids. The police said his injuries were not life-threatening.
The French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, told members of Parliament today that the broad crackdown was necessary because the Iranian opposition group wanted to use France as an international base of operations to supplement their activities from their headquarters in Iraq.
"The Mujahedeen wanted to make France their rear base," Mr. Sarkozy said. "We couldn't accept that."
The top antiterrorism judge in France, Jean-Louis Bruguière, ordered the raids after uncovering a "criminal conspiracy with the intent to prepare acts of terrorism and financing of a terrorist enterprise," Gérard Laurent, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said in a telephone interview.
The Iranian government praised the French action. "We have been waiting for a long time for the French authorities to act against them and conform with the decision of the European Union, which had declared this small group to be terrorist," said a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry.
The People's Mujahedeen, based in Baghdad, has long been the best-organized political and military operation fighting to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran. In 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright designated the group as a foreign terrorist organization. The European Union declared it a terrorist organization in May 2002.
But during the American-led war against Iraq this year, the United States flirted with using the group to prevent Iran from meddling in Iraq's internal affairs.
Then, after a high-level policy review in Washington, the United States decided instead to disarm the group's army. American soldiers from the Fourth Infantry Division now monitor the group, which has turned over its heavy weapons and stays in designated areas northeast of Baghdad.
The People's Mujahedeen does not enjoy much support inside Iran, largely because of its ties to Iraq. It has not been involved in the recent protests in Iran, which have been organized by students at Tehran's main universities.
The United States and other European countries helped provide crucial intelligence that led to today's arrests, one of the biggest domestic intelligence operations in years, said one senior official.
More than 1,300 French police officers, many of them masked and armed with automatic rifles and supported by helicopters, were involved in the early morning raid at the group's headquarters in the north Parisian suburb of Auvers-sur-Oise, and in Yvelines west of Paris.
The crackdown was nicknamed "Operation Theo," after Theo Van Gogh, the art dealer who lived for a while with his brother Vincent, the painter, in Auvers-sur-Oise. Both men are buried there.