TEHRAN // Iran hanged the Sunni militant leader Abdolmalek Rigi in Evin prison yesterday for "taking up arms against the Islamic state and corruption on earth" after his appeal against his death sentence was turned down by the country's chief justice.
According to a statement on the website of the Public and Revolutionary Court, Rigi had pleaded guilty to all 79 charges against him, including armed attack and robbery, bombing, kidnapping and murder and connections with foreign secret services, including "intelligence officers of the US and Israel working under the cover of Nato and certain Arab countries" as well as "anti-revolutionary expatriate groups such as the MKO", the People's Mujahedin of Iran.
During his trial, the rebel leader "requested the victims' families' forgiveness" and asked the members of his organisation "not to repeat his mistakes", the statement said. The 26-year-old leader of the Pakistan-based Jundullah, also known as the People's Resistance Movement of Iran, was arrested by Iranian security forces on February 23 when his flight from Dubai to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan was forced to land in Bandar Abbas in southern Iran by Iranian fighter jets, and searched by security forces.
Rigi, whose organisation ambushed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidential motorcade in 2005 during his visit to Sistan and Baluchistan province and killed one of his bodyguards, was shown on Iran's state-run Press TV two days after his arrest confessing to his links to Nato officials in Afghanistan and foreign intelligence agencies, including the CIA and Mossad. Iranian officials have used Rigi's confessions as evidence of US support for terrorist organisations and of plots by Iran's enemies to fuel sectarian violence in Iran and destabilise the country.
"Rigi's terrorist group was supported by secret services of the US, Britain and some other countries," Iran's intelligence minister, Haydar Moslehi, said after the militant leader's arrest. He alleged that the United States and a European country that he did not name had asked Rigi to launch terrorist operations against Iran. Rigi, a member of the Balochi Rigi tribe, founded Jundullah in 2003 in the religiously and ethnically divided Sistan and Baluchistan province of Iran "to defend the rights of the Baluchi people and improve their conditions" and "to fight for the rights of the Sunni Muslims in Iran", according to Jundullah's official website.
His bother, Abdolhamid, was hanged after a conviction on similar charges on May 24 in the city of Zahedan in the presence of the families of the victims of Jundullah attacks. According to Abdolmalek Rigi's taped confessions, he had been on his way to Bishkek to meet "a high-ranking" official at the Manas US military base in Kyrgyzstan to discuss attacks on Iranian territory when he was captured by Iranian security forces. He said he had met Americans at a US military base in Afghanistan 24 hours prior to his arrest.
Rigi said in the taped confession that he had been approached by US agents in Quetta, Pakistan in 2008 and that they had promised to provide his group with arms as well as an operation base in Afghanistan near the Iranian border. "They promised to help us and cooperate with us, free our prisoners and give us military equipment, bombs, machine guns and a base" in return for launching attacks on Iran, challenging Iran's power in the region and causing problems for the Islamic state, he said on the tape.
Rigi said the promises were repeated by US agents in Dubai in meetings with one of his friends. The United States has denied Rigi's allegations. Jundullah had taken responsibility for a bomb blast in May 2009 in a mosque in the city of Zahedan in Sistan and Baluchistan province that killed 25 people as well as a suicide car bombing last October that killed 40, including several senior Revolutionary Guards commanders, during a gathering of Shia and Sunni tribal leaders near the town of Sarbaz in the same province.
Iranian officials have on various occasions claimed the existence of a link between Rigi's Jundullah and al Qa'eda. In confessions aired by state-run television, Abdolhamid Rigi, who was captured in Pakistan and extradited to Iran in 2009, alleged that his brother had ties to al Qa'eda and had been questioned about that affiliation by his US contacts in Pakistan. Abdolhamid Rigi also claimed that his brother met CIA and FBI agents in Islamabad and Karachi and received $100,000 (Dh367,289) to fuel sectarian violence in Iran.
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