Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ‘could be kidnapped by Mossad’

Israel’s secret service could abduct Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s virulently anti-Israeli president, and deliver him to the International Criminal Court to face charges of incitement to genocide, one of the Jewish state’s most renowned former agents has suggested. 

Rafi Eitan, a top former Mossad operative who oversaw the abduction of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, said the spy organisation could mete out similar treatment to the Iranian leader, who has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” in the past, and who is currently suspected by Israel of developing a nuclear arsenal. 

Now holding a post in the country’s security cabinet, the 81-year-old said that, while the days of hunting down Nazis may be over, the same tactics could be maintained for the Jewish state’s current worst enemies. 

"It could very well be that a leader such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suddenly finds himself before the International Criminal Court in The Hague," Mr Eitan, who is currently minister for pensioners' affairs, told Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine. 

Asked if kidnapping was acceptable, Mr Eitan said, “Yes. Any way to bring him for trial in The Hague is a possibility…Those who spread poison and want to eradicate another people have to expect such consequences.” 

Mr Eitan headed the Mossad team that tracked down Eichmann, one of the main engineers of the Nazi regime’s genocide against European Jewry, and arranged for him to be kidnapped from his hideout in Argentina and secretly brought to Israel, where he was tried and hanged. 

He revealed last week that his Mossad team had concentrated their hunt on Eichmann even though news of his capture allowed the equally notorious Josef Mengele, a doctor who carried out murderous experiments on live inmates in the Auschwitz death camp, to get away. 

Israel has repeatedly warned that it has not ruled any measure out in dealing with a potentially nuclear-armed Iran, and in recent months has carried out practice bombing runs to weigh the possibility of a strike on Tehran’s nuclear facilities, as it did against Saddam Hussein’s fledgling nuclear plant almost 30 years ago. 

Almost a year ago, Israeli bombers unexpectedly struck a suspect site in Syria, which is closely allied to Iran, blowing up a site without ever identifying exactly what had been destroyed. Speculation was rife that it had been a chemical or nuclear facility linked either to Iran or North Korea, although no proof was ever offered for either thesis. continues here

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