Dutch police suspect Bulgarian man of Iranian activist’s murder in 2017

Dutch police are looking into a Bulgarian suspect for his involvement in the murder of Iranian activist Ahmad Mola Nissi (52) in 2017. The man is currently imprisoned abroad due to a different murder charge. Dutch detectives have spoken to the suspect, the police reported on Tuesday.

Nissi was fatally shot in front of his house on the Jan van Riebeekstraat in The Hague in November 2017. He was one of the founders of the Arabic-Iranian resistance movement, Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz (ASMLA), a separatist group that is striving for an Arabic state in the southwest of Iran.

Since 2006, Nissi and his family had lived in the Netherlands “because they no longer felt safe in Iran,” police said. The Cabinet wrote in a letter to the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of Dutch parliament, in the early months of 2019 that the intelligence service AIVD had “strong indication” that Iran was involved with the murder.

Although police have said that they have seen no concrete evidence for this claim. They suspect a Dutch criminal group of planning and committing the assassination.

DNA traces were secured after the murder, which has now led the detectives to the Bulgarian. It has not been ruled out that other suspects will be identified in regards to the murder.