Denmark Summons Saudi Envoy over Funding Anti-Iran Terror Group
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The Saudi ambassador was summoned to the Danish foreign ministry over its support for a notorious terrorist group behind a 2018 deadly attack in Iran’s southwestern city of Ahvaz.
Danish police said they were prosecuting “three people for financing and promoting terrorism in Iran, including in collaboration with a Saudi intelligence service”.
“We will not accept such activities under any circumstances and our ambassador in Riyadh has repeated the same message directly to the Saudi authorities,” Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod said in a statement, in which he deplored "new very serious charges”, AFP reported.
The trio has been facing prosecution since February for spying for Saudi intelligence.
According to the Danish intelligence service PET, they worked for Riyadh between 2012 and 2018.
In February, Denmark said its intelligence service had arrested and charged three members of the Saudi-backed terror group for spying on behalf of the kingdom in the Scandinavian country.
The terrorist group Al-Ahvaziya has committed numerous crimes against Iranian targets over the past decades, among them bomb attacks in public places, abductions, assassinations, kidnapping for ransom, shooting at tourists, and blowing up oil pipelines.
Formed a few years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the terror group was inspired back then by the Baathist regime of Iraq’s ex-dictator Saddam Hussein.
Al-Ahvaziya has been after separating the southwestern province of Khuzestan — home to the country’s Arab population — from the rest of Iran through engaging in armed conflict against the Iranian government.
In September 2018, the Saudi-backed terror outfit claimed responsibility for a deadly attack on a military parade in Ahvaz, Khuzestan’s provincial capital. The assault killed 25 people, including members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and civilian bystanders, and injured 70 others.
Shortly after the attack, the London-based “Iran International” television channel funded by Saudi Arabia allowed the al-Ahvaziya spokesman to go live on air to defend the bloodshed.
