Swiss warrant accuses ex-Iran minister of killing

ZURICH, Apr 9 (Reuters) Switzerland has issued an international warrant for the arrest of a former Iranian intelligence minister in connection with the killing of an Iranian dissident, according to the warrant obtained by Reuters.

The warrant, issued by the investigative judge of the Swiss canton (state) of Vaude, accused Ali Fallahian of ordering the killing of Kazem Rajavi, a senior official of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, in 1990 in Switzerland.

Vaude authorities were unavailable to comment on the warrant. A Swiss federal prosecution spokesman declined comment.

''Ali Fallahian was already intelligence and security affairs minister ... at the time that the assassination of Kazem Rajavi was planned and executed. He decided and ordered the execution of Kazem Rajavi in 1982 or 1983,'' the document, provided by Iranian dissidents in exile, said.

A group of 13 people had laid the meticulous groundwork for Rajavi's killing, the warrant said, all of whom had already been placed on an earlier international arrest warrant.

A group of four then shot the Geneva professor dead in his car not far from the town of Coppet, where he lived, it said.

FALLAHIAN SITS ON SUPERVISORY PANEL Fallahian, a mid-ranking cleric, sits on Iran's Assembly of Experts, the 86-member council which constitutionally supervises Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran is the political wing of the leftist People's Mujahideen, key players in the 1979 revolution who lost the ensuing bloody power struggle with increasingly dominant clerical factions.

Washington lists both the council and the People's Mujahideen as terrorists.

A German court in 1996 issued an arrest warrant for Fallahian, the warrant said, in connection with the so-called Mykonos affair in which he was accused of having played a role in the killing of four Kurdish dissidents in Berlin in 1992.

Argentina also wants Fallahian, accusing him of having organised a bomb attack on a Jewish organisation in Buenos Aires in 1994 which killed 85 people and injured 100 others, the arrest warrant, which was dated March 20, also said.

REUTERS SRS RK2305