An alleged Iranian plot to kill a Jewish former politician has been foiled by Canadian security services before it came to fruition, according to The Globe and Mail newspaper.
Irwin Cotler, 84, a Canadian human-rights advocate and former justice minister who also served as attorney general, said he was the subject of an alleged assassination plot by two suspected Iranian agents.
Having been warned of the alleged plot by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on October 26, Cotler was placed under its protection. He had previously been under surveillance following the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel after the Canadian Security Intelligence Service named him as a high-profile target of Iran.
Newsweek reached out to Canada’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Global Affairs Canada for comment via email outside of business hours.
Newsweek has also reached out to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the Islamic Republic of Iran for comment via email.
Cotler had previously been critical of the Iranian regime for its actions in the 2020 downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, in which all 176 people onboard were killed, as well as the country’s funding of the militant group Hamas.
Iran said that its military accidentally shot down the flight leaving Tehran for Kyiv as it thought it was a “hostile target” after the aircraft flew toward a “sensitive military center” of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Cotler has been known to Iran since he began his 2008 campaign to list the state army, the IRGC, as a terrorist entity, which Canada and the U.S. later enacted.
In response to the alleged assassination plot, Cotler said, “We hold the regime accountable and send the message that we will not be intimidated, that we will not be silenced.”
He added, “We are really dealing with a collective danger to our human security and, regrettably, Iran has been able to carry this out amidst a culture of impunity.”
Cotler also said that he believes Iran has become a “case study of what today is the phenomenon not only of transnational repression, but transnational assassination” and that it is now a “leading state actor in that particular assault on our national security and sovereignty.”
The former justice minister was also contacted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding the unsealing of an indictment in the U.S. pertaining to another alleged Iranian murder-for-hire plot targeting President-elect Donald Trump and others in the U.S. The Iranian government has denied the allegations.
The FBI contacted Cotler as his name came up during an investigation, although he was not listed as one of the targets.
A lawyer as well as politician, Cotler served as Canada’s first special envoy on Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism from 2020 to 2023. He founded the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights in 2015, which advocates for political prisoners and fighting global injustice.
Source » newsweek