Turkey on Monday announced that it has arrested 11 Islamic Republic agents over abducting Iranian dissidents and smuggling them into Iran including a prominent Arab opposition leader.
Habib Chaab, an Iranian Arab leader of the Ahvaz National Resistance was kidnapped in Tureky’s Istanbul by Islamic Republic Intelligence Agency known as Etelaat. He was reportedly lured into flying to Turkey by an Etelaat operative allegedly his Ex-wife.
Islamic Republic accuses the Ahvaz National Resistance of being behind an attack on a military parade in Iran's southwestern city of Ahvaz in 2018, killing at least 25 people.
According to a Turkish official, Chaab, who was based in Sweden, was persuaded to fly to Turkey to meet a woman who secretly worked for Iranian intelligence.
After arriving in Istanbul, he was drugged and tied down, the official said.
Istanbul police said Chaab was spirited from the city to Turkey’s eastern province of Van, and from there across the border into Iran.
Turkish broadcaster CNN Turk said the operation to detain the 11 suspected of abducting Chaab was also prompted by the seizure of other Iranian opposition figures.
Turkey’s announcement came after tensions raised last week between the two countries over Turkish president Erdogan’s reading of a poem during a ceremony in Azerbaijan which Tehran deemed to support a secession of Azeri ethnic parts of Iran.
Turkey has been highly criticized in the past years for cooperating with Iranian intelligence agency, arresting Iranian opposition activists and extraditing them to Iran.
After spending one year in Turkish jail, Kurdish-Iranian activist Adel Bahrami was deported to Iran in late 2019.
