Iran Focus

London, Mar. 25 – Iran’s ultra-secretive Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) has once again found itself under the limelight after it was accused of involvement in the murder of an Iranian intellectual in Spain.

Manouchehr Farhangi, 82, was murdered in La Moraleja, a suburb of the Spanish capital Madrid, on 19 March.

Evidence from a Spanish female eye-witness suggests that an unidentified woman fatally stabbed Farhangi at his doorstep and quickly fled the scene.

Local Spanish press reported that an autopsy found that he had been stabbed three times in the stomach.

Police camera footage from the vicinity of the murder indicated that the female suspect was between the age of 28 and 30.

Spanish police believe that the murder might have been politically motivated, and there have been suggestions in the press that Iran’s notorious Intelligence Ministry might have orchestrated the attack.

The Madrid Police Department has stated that the murder took place a day after Farhangi had a dispute with a woman who had been putting up propaganda posters in defence of the Islamic Republic in the district of Alcobendas.

Farhangi was born into a Zoroastrian family in 1926 in the south-eastern Iranian province of Kerman. Prior to the 1979 Islamic revolution, he founded one of Iran’s biggest pharmaceutical companies. In 1980, in Spain he founded the International College Spain (ICS), and later won the European Council for International Schools (ECIS) prize for the Promotion of International Education. He has two children.