In its dogged pursuit of a new nuclear deal with Iran, Team Biden is lifting sanctions on several Iranian officials, including some of the world’s worst human rights abusers, a report said.
The deal, which is close to being finalized during negotiations in Vienna, would lift sanctions on President Ebrahim Raisi, who “helped execute around 5,000 Iranian political dissidents and religious minorities in the 1988 Death Commissions,” Thread Reader’s Gabriel Noronha, a State Department official during the Trump administration. reported.
“Raisi presided as a judge overseeing the sham trials – including of young children – that typically only lasted a few minutes before the guilty verdict was delivered,” the report said. “Raisi’s victims were loaded by forklifts in groups of six up onto cranes and hanged every 30 minutes.”
Others who Team Biden is set to lift sanctions on include those “implicated in the torture and execution of political dissidents, the murder of protesters, and the persecution of Iran’s LGBTQ community,” the report said.
Team Biden’s deal with Iran would also lift sanctions against Ahmad Jannati, one of the regime’s most powerful clerics.
Jannati’s “main day job is rigging the country’s elections, but in his spare time he leads the massive rallies in ‘Death to America/England/Israel’ chants,” the report said.
“As one might expect, both Raisi and Jannati lead the persecution against Iran’s LGBTQ community,” Noronha wrote. “Raisi called homosexuality ‘nothing but savagery’. Jannati prefers harsher language and ‘judicial’ sentences that I won’t repeat in writing here.”
Several members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) responsible for carrying out terrorist attacks overseas are also expected to be removed from sanctions list, according to Noronha. Those include Mohsen Rezaee, who directed the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Argentina, and IRGC Brigadier General and former Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan, who directed the 1983 Beirut Marine Corps barracks bombing.
The negotiating team in Vienna is also prepared to release up to $7 billion in sanctioned cash to Iran as part of a prisoner exchange, Iranian state-run media reported. The US government denied the report to Reuters. Noronha added that his former colleagues say the report is accurate.
