Irwin Cotler at at the Antisemitism: Face It, Fight It conference in Ottawa on Oct. 17, 2023.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Iran allegedly plotted to assassinate Irwin Cotler, a noted Canadian human-rights advocate and harsh critic of the clerical regime, but the attempt on his life was recently foiled by law-enforcement authorities.
According to a source, the RCMP on Oct. 26 informed Mr. Cotler, a former Liberal justice minister, that he faced imminent threat of assassination within 48 hours from Iranian agents.
The source said legal authorities had knowledge of two suspects in the plot but it is not known whether they have been arrested or fled the country. The source said the 84-year-old Mr. Cotler was advised on Thursday that the threat against him had been significantly lowered. The Globe and Mail is not identifying the source because they were not authorized to discuss national-security issues.
The RCMP did not immediately respond when contacted Sunday by The Globe.
Mr. Cotler has been under 24/7 RCMP protection for more than a year after the Oct. 7, 2023 mass killings in Israel by Hamas gunmen. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) told him that he was a high-profile target of Iran, a long-time sponsor of the militant group.
The close protection provided to Mr. Cotler includes bulletproof vehicles, heavily armed officers and other security measures.
He has been on Iran’s radar for his global campaign since 2008 to list the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC] as a terrorist entity. He has also represented Iranian political prisoners and is a strong supporter of Israel. In June, under pressure from opposition parties, Canada joined the United States in declaring the IRGC a banned terrorist group. Ottawa severed diplomatic ties with Iran more than a decade ago.
Mr. Cotler served as Canada’s first special envoy on Holocaust remembrance and combatting antisemitism from 2020 to 2023. He is the international chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. Mr. Cotler’s daughter, Gila, who heads the centre, did not respond to a request for comment.
On top of the alleged plot against Mr. Cotler, Canada is grappling with foreign interference from China, Russia, India and other countries, and allegations that New Delhi was behind the killings of two Sikh separatist activists in Canada, Hardeep Singh Nijjar and Sukhdool Singh Gill, as well as extortion and other violent acts.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has also been in touch with Mr. Cotler about the unsealing of an indictment in New York involving an Iranian murder-for-hire operation, the source said. Although not mentioned in the indictment, the source said Mr. Cotler was told by the FBI that his name came up in its probe.
On Oct. 22, the U.S. Justice Department accused senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard official Ruhollah Bazghandi of involvement in a 2022 plot to kill American human-rights activist Masih Alinejad, using members of an Eastern European criminal organization in New York.
“That is happening more and more with intelligence services using criminals to do work for them and it gives them plausible deniability,” said Alan Treddenick, a former CSIS station chief in Saudi Arabia.
Recent U.S. indictments have revealed that Iran’s transnational repression operations involved murder-for-hire plots to kill U.S. president-elect Donald Trump and Ms. Alinejad. U.S. authorities say the IRGC’s elite Quds Force has for years targeted critics and recently began outsourcing assassination plots to organized crime groups and violent criminals.
Iran’s Quds Force is a clandestine wing of the IRGC that is largely responsible for foreign operations such as arming Hezbollah and Hamas and carrying out assassinations.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Justice Department charged Farhad Shakeri, said to be an Iranian government asset who spent time in American prisons for robbery, in connection with an alleged plot ordered by Iran’s IRGC to kill Mr. Trump and Ms. Alinejad.
Mr. Shakeri is at large and remains in Iran. Two other men were arrested on charges that Mr. Shakeri recruited them to follow and kill Ms. Alinejad.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei denied the allegations as a “repulsive” plot by Israel and Iranian dissidents to “complicate matters between America and Iran.”
Daniel Stanton, a former CSIS senior manager, said Iran targets high-profile critics like Mr. Cotler and Ms. Alinejad as a warning to others.
“Regimes like Iran and also India want to hit the most high-profile, outspoken critics and dissidents because that sends a message to the people who don’t have that status to basically shut up,” said Mr. Stanton, now director of the national-security program at the University of Ottawa Professional Development Institute. He recently played host to Ms. Alinejad at the university.
“A lot of these intelligence agencies find it difficult to operate in countries like Canada and the United States so they have to hire unscrupulous proxies to carry out the dirty work and that is easy to detect.”
Mr. Cotler, a renowned international human-rights lawyer, has criticized many authoritarian governments, including Iran for its conduct in the 2020 downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, which left about 55 Canadians and 30 permanent residents dead, as well as Tehran’s funding of Hamas. The group, designated a terrorist entity by Canada, carried out the Oct. 7 attacks against Israel that left about 1,200 people dead, and hundreds taken hostage.
He warned that authoritarian regimes are waging a war against Western countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia and many of those in Europe “through three primary methods – electoral interference, transnational repression, and the spreading of harmful disinformation.”
In 2015, Mr. Cotler founded the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, a Montreal-based organization dedicated to promoting human rights, advocating for political prisoners and combatting injustice around the world. The group works in the memory of Mr. Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved 100,000 Jews during the Second World War by issuing them diplomatic passports and sheltering them in safe houses.
With a report from Reuters