French police on Tuesday launched a major crackdown on the leading Iranian armed opposition group, the People's Mujahedeen, detaining more than 150 people and seizing up to 7 million dollars in a series of dawn raids in the Paris region.
Among those arrested in the operation -- described by the French interior ministry as one of the biggest undertaken by the domestic intelligence services in the last 30 years -- was the group's figurehead Maryam Rajavi.
More than 1,200 officers targeted 13 locations in the northwestern outskirts of Paris, including the European headquarters in the town of Auvers-sur-Oise of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) -- a political umbrella group dominated by the People's Mujahedeen.
"The Mujahedeen wanted to make France their rear base -- we couldn't accept that," Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said of the group, considered by the US, the EU and Iran to be a "terrorist" organization.
Interior ministry officials explained that the group, deprived of support from Saddam Hussein following the US-led toppling of the Iraqi regime in April, had made the Auvers-sur-Oise compound its international base.
In Tehran, Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi hailed the raids as a "positive step on the part of France," adding, "We are expecting France to treat these people as dangerous terrorists".
But People's Mujahedeen spokesman Ali Safavi told reporters by telephone from London that the allegations were "absolutely preposterous," accusing Paris of launching the raid to "curry favor with the fundamentalist regime in Iran".
Officials said Tuesday's operation, ordered by France's leading anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere as part of an investigation dating back to 2001, had effectively dismantled the group's infrastructure in France.
Police sources said 159 people were being held in preventive detention. Six people detained in the raids were released during the day.
About 20 people including the group's leader Rajavi and one of her brothers were due to be transferred Tuesday evening for questioning by counter-terrorism investigators in Paris, police said.
Police said they had uncovered a safe containing about US$1.3 million in US$100 bills and large amounts of computer equipment in one villa. Another US$177,000 was found in a separate safe.
Investigators later found four trunks filled with bank notes, one containing about US$1.25 million, while the other three were each estimated to hold between US$1 million and US$1.5 million.
No weapons or ammunition were discovered during Tuesday's raids, although police seized several bulletproof vests, and the operation was declared over at around 9pm local time.
It was not immediately clear why the French authorities chose now to act on the People's Mujahedeen.
Rights groups including the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights questioned the crackdown, stressing that the group had long been based in France without causing concern to the authorities.
"This raid again highlights the dangers of so-called anti-terrorist procedures," the groups said in a statement, urging the French authorities to respect the rights of political asylum holders.
The raids came as the Iranian government confronted anti-regime protests by reformers at home and demands from abroad to open up the country's nuclear program to international controls.
French intelligence sources said they had no evidence that the group's members were planning to commit attacks in France.
Court sources said investigators were more focused on the movement of large sums of money in and out of accounts linked to the group, saying they could amount to the "financing of terrorist activity".
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