Monday, July 18, 2005

Qods Force commander slain in Iran capital

Iran Focus:
A colonel in the elite Qods (Jerusalem) Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps was killed in a fashionable neighbourhood of Tehran on Thursday, according to the state-sponsored website Baztab.

Colonel Morteza Moinfar was a commander in the Qods Force, the extraterritorial arm of the Revolutionary Guards whose stated mission is to “export the Islamic revolution” to other Muslim countries.

The Qods Force has been responsible for some of the biggest terrorist attacks sponsored by Iran in the Middle East, Europe, and South America, including the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 Americans.

The force has been the lead agency of the Iranian regime’s clandestine activities in Iraq and has a large network of operators and informants across the country.

Moinfar had been repeatedly stabbed, the report said. Authorities have launched a massive manhunt to find his killers.