On July 6, the Foreign Relations Committee of Belgium’s lower chamber voted for a treaty with the Iranian regime to exchange ‘sentenced prisoners.’ The treaty had already been signed on March 11, but it was kept secret until June 30, then hastily pushed through the parliament for approval.

The treaty faced severe objections, both from inside Belgium and abroad. Almost all of the objectors agreed that the ‘treaty’ had been designed to secure the release of the convicted and imprisoned Iranian terrorist Assadollah Assadi, the former third counselor of Iran’s embassy in Vienna, Austria.

In February 2021, a court in Antwerp sentenced Assadi to 20 years in jail for masterminding a bomb plot against the Iranian opposition, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), and their gathering near Paris in June 2018.

Farzin Hashemi, the deputy chair of the NCRI Foreign AffairsCommittee, stated, “If he had succeeded, hundreds would have been killed.”

Iranian dissidents, the potential victims of Assadi’s plot, have repeatedly held protest rallies in Brussels, Stockholm, London, Oslo, Aarhus, and Malmo, as well as many cities in the United States and Canada over the past week. They called the treaty a ‘shameful deal’ and demanded that Belgian authorities keep Assadi in jail.

Source: Iran Focus