Iran regime profits from ‘dirty money,’ Nobel peace laureate says

The only Iranian to win a Nobel Prize has launched a withering attack on the regime in Tehran.

Shirin Ebadi, 71, the 2003 peace laureate, said the overwhelming majority of Iranians would get rid of their rulers if they could, and she accused the ayatollahs of profiting from Western sanctions.

“Economic sanctions are not to the benefit of the people. They make the people poor,” she said on Friday.

“However, those who are close to the regime benefit from economic sanctions because it gives them the opportunity to gain dirty money. So it’s good for them.”

With enough international pressure other than sanctions, Iran’s rulers could be forced from power, Ebadi said.

“In my view, it’s very likely, because at the beginning of the revolution, 90 percent of the Iranian population wanted this regime. Now, if you took another poll through free elections, you would see that 90 percent of people don’t want the regime anymore.

“The world has to do things which weaken the Iranian government.”

Ebadi, who has lived in exile in the UK since 2009, said she had doubts about the 1979 Iranian revolution almost from the start.

“It started a day after the revolution, when in a five-minute court session they sentenced to death the heads of the previous regime, and executed all of them on the rooftop of the school where Ayatollah Khomeini was residing.”

Iran’s current leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on Friday that chants of “Death to America” would continue. They were directed at President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton, he said. “It means death to America’s rulers ... we have nothing against the American people.”