Hossein Ansari Rad, a former Iranian lawmaker has revealed that the Iranian Intelligence Ministry had recorded fake "confessions" by a few individuals disguised as drug smugglers to provide evidence for the case of serial murders engineered by the ministry in the late 1990s in Iran.
The case was about the Iranian Intelligence Ministry being actively plotting against dozens of secular intellectuals who campaigned against the Islamic Republic and having them murdered by its agents.
At the time, the government acknowledged the killing of a handful of well-known intellectuals, but semi-independent media spoke of up to 60 individuals killed in Iran and abroad. Later, the intelligence minister Dorri Njafabadi was fired by President Mohammad Khatami.
This is the second scandal involving the Intelligence Ministry in recent weeks. Earlier, media reports confirmed by the spokesman of the Rouhani administration, Ali Rabiei, pointed out that the Intelligence Ministry had jailed and tortured over a hundred innocent people and forced them to confess that they were involved in the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists in the 2010s and executed one of them.
Intelligence Minister Mahmud Alavi promised at the Iranian Parliament to provide explanations on the case, but he has not done so several weeks after the case was revealed.
The former MP says video recording of forced confessions in both cases are available and the ones about the serial murders case have been made public.