Ruhollah Hosseinian

Hojatoleslam Ruhollah Hosseinian (Persian: روح الله حسینیان ‎‎, born 1955 in Shiraz) is an Iranian Principalist politician.

He served in the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and National Security (or VEVAK) as deputy to Ali Fallahian and in April 2007 was appointed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the security advisor to the president.

He is a member of Board of Trustees of Islamic Revolution Document Center. and since 2007 has been a member of the Council for Spreading Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Thoughts. As of January 2011 he was a member of parliament

In 1998 a series of murders of dissident Iranian intellectuals came to light, called "the Chain Murders", widely thought to be an attempt to intimidate Iranian reformists. On January 4, 1999, the Intelligence Ministry issued a statement admitting that its own agents had committed the murders and stating that they were led by a rogue officer, Saeed Emami.

Hosseinian made a number of statements about the murders. Shortly after the ministry admission he claimed that Emami was innocent of the crimes which were actually the work of President Khatami's reformists.

According to Muhammad Sahimi of the Tehran Bureau, on January 12, 1999, Hosseinian appeared on the TV program Cheraq (Light), where he claimed both that reformists had murdered the victims and that the murders could be justified. Some of the victims were apostates,

while others had insulted the Prophet, his family, and the Imams. He also said that the murderers had been Islamic leftists in the 1980s and had strongly supported Mohammad Khatami in his presidential campaign for president. Later on, at the Haghani School -- run by ... Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi -- Hosseinian said that Mostafa Kazemi had masterminded the murders to create fissures between Khatami and Khamenei, and allow the former to seize power. He also acknowledged, "The issue of the murders has captured us. Whatever we do to escape it, we find to way to escape."

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