Stockholm-based Iraqi newspaper reporter arrested for ‘operating as an Iranian spy’

Swedish police have arrested a prominent Iraqi journalist on suspicion of operating as an Iranian spy, the latest in a series of police actions against alleged Iranian plots in Western Europe.

Raghdan al-Khazali, a journalist based in Stockholm, is suspected of spying on members of an Ahwazi opposition group which has been repeatedly targeted by Iranian assassins in Europe. 

The Ahwazi are an Arab minority from western Iran and one of their main dissident groups, the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA), has been the subject of a coordinated Iranian killing campaign. 

One of the group’s leaders, Ahmad Mola Nissi, was gunned down in the Netherlands in 2017. The Dutch government said earlier this year that Iran had hired local gangsters to carry out the assassination.  

Last October, Swedish police arrested a Norwegian man of Iranian descent who they alleged was involved in a plot to murder another ASMLA leader based in Copenhagen. 

Mr Khazali was Stockholm correspondent for the Euro-Times, a newspaper which has won readers across Europe since it was launched in Sweden in 2016. 

However, he is also alleged to have made repeated visits to a television station in the Netherlands that is alleged to have links to ASMLA. 

Mr Khazali told the ASMLA that he opposed the Iranian regime.

But members of the group were alarmed to see a photograph of him in southern Iraq meeting with Qais Khazali, the leader of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, an Iraqi militia with close ties to Iran. 

“We asked: ‘How are you able to travel there, when you are against Iran?’ He didn’t have a very convincing answer,” a source said. 

Mr Khazali is believed to be a member of the same tribe as the militia leader, which could have guaranteed his safety in the area.   

The ASMLA campaign for the Ahwazi to be able to separate from Iran and form an Arab state of their own. Iran considers the group a terrorist organisation and claims the group has carried out a string of bombing attacks in Iran. 

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