Nearly a month since he says a team of Iranian intelligence agents tried to drug him and take him back to Iran, Mehrdad Abdarbashi said he was thankful to Turkish authorities for saving his life but worried he is still not safe.
“I don’t think I am safe in any city in Turkey right now,” he told Al Jazeera. “I think Iranian intelligence will come after me, and this time they won’t try to kidnap me, this time they will just kill me.”
Holed up in an undisclosed location in eastern Turkey, the former Iranian military helicopter pilot said he was going to great lengths to keep a low profile, never leaving home, and ordering all he needs online.
According to official Turkish state media, Turkish police and intelligence detained eight people, including two described as Iranian “agents”, on September 24 as they attempted to kidnap Abdarbashi.
The suspects appeared in a court in Van on October 4 to face charges of espionage and conspiracy to commit a crime.
It is not the first time Iranian dissidents have been targeted by Tehran inside Turkey.
Last October, Habib Chaab, who headed the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz, a separatist group Tehran accuses of attacks inside Iran, travelled from his home in exile in Sweden to Istanbul to meet an Iranian woman.
Less than 24 hours later, Turkish officials said, he was bundled into a van and driven nearly 2,000km east to the Iranian border, to appear in a televised confession on Iranian television days later.
In February, Turkish authorities said they arrested an Iranian working at the Iranian consulate in Istanbul for the 2019 fatal shooting of Masoud Molavi Vardanjani, a vocal dissident of Tehran living in Turkey. Iran has denied it had anything to do with Vardanjani’s killing.
Source: Aljazeera
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