The Belgian weekly HUMO has plunged to a new journalistic low with its recent platforming of two convicted terrorists, Amir Saadouni and Nasimeh Naami, as if they were confused amateurs caught in some tragic misunderstanding, rather than trained operatives of the Iranian regime’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). Their interview, published on 24 November 2025, is a masterclass in self-pity, narrative manipulation, and barefaced lies. It is the latest instalment of a propaganda effort designed not by these two criminals, but by their former handler, the so-called diplomat Assadollah Assadi, now safely back in Tehran, where he lectures the world about his innocence while boasting of ideological indoctrination sessions he delivered to fellow inmates in Belgian custody.
The HUMO article attempts to launder the reputations of Saadouni and Naami, two people whose guilt was not merely “alleged,” not “contested,” but proven beyond any doubt in two independent Belgian courts. They were convicted for attempting to detonate half a kilogram of TATP, one of the most lethal explosives used by ISIS and al-Qaeda, at the National Council of Resistance of Iran’s (NCRI) 2018 Free Iran Summit in Villepinte, Paris. I attended that rally. Their intended target was the NCRI’s President-elect, Mrs Maryam Rajavi. The expected collateral damage? Thousands of innocent civilians, European parliamentarians, American diplomats, NGO leaders, journalists, and Iranian dissidents. The intention was nothing short of mass political murder on European soil.
Yet HUMO, astonishingly, offers this pair of would-be mass killers a sympathetic platform. Their claims are as ludicrous as they are insulting. They say they thought the device in their car was “a firecracker.” They claim the bomb was designed to kill them, so that the Iranian regime could blame the NCRI. They allege sabotage of their car by EU intelligence services. They declare themselves victims of an international conspiracy. Their excuses were not believed by the Belgian trial court. They were not believed by the Belgian Court of Appeal. They were not believed by the German investigators who arrested Assadi with evidence in his possession. They were not believed by the bomb-disposal experts who risked their lives defusing the professionally constructed device, one so powerful that it injured a specialist even under controlled conditions. But HUMO, in its infinite wisdom, believes them now.
The Belgian Court of Appeal’s findings could not be clearer. The judges concluded that the terrorists knew exactly what they were doing; the bomb was professionally built and required deliberate activation; the operation was planned, coordinated, and directed by the MOIS; the targets were Mrs. Rajavi and the packed Villepinte hall; and financial motivation played a central role. Evidence included encrypted communications, cash transfers totalling hundreds of thousands of euros, intelligence-gathering assignments, surveillance operations, and years of meetings with MOIS agents, including repeated trips to Tehran for training and tasking.
The narratives propagated by Saadouni and Naami and the narrative simultaneously promoted by their superior, Assadollah Assadi, is the clearest proof that this is a propaganda tool designed by the mullahs’ MOIS. In a 20 September 2025 interview with Javan Online, Assadi, who personally delivered the bomb using a diplomatic pouch in violation of the Vienna Convention, regurgitated the same nonsense: he was innocent; Europe conspired against him; courts were manipulated; the NCRI was to blame; his trial was “fabricated.” When the mastermind and his operatives all tell the same story, at the same time, using the same phrases, it is not a coincidence. It is coordination.
One of the most astonishing lines in the HUMO interview comes near the end, when the two terrorists declare that once “the ayatollahs are gone,” and Reza Pahlavi comes to power, they will happily return to Iran. Suddenly, two long-term MOIS assets, who spent eleven years collecting intelligence on Iranian dissidents for cash, feel deep monarchist nostalgia, longing for the son of the deposed and hated Shah to reclaim the Peacock Throne. It is darkly amusing that these newly minted “monarchists” find themselves ideologically aligned with Pahlavi’s recent praise for the “courageous men” of the IRGC, whom he claims to have recruited, and the re-emergence of Parviz Sabeti, the notorious former deputy head of the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK. What an extraordinary coalition: the IRGC, SAVAK’s old guard, Reza Pahlavi, and two convicted MOIS terrorists.If this were a satire, no editor on earth would accept it.
The Iranian regime has long pursued terrorism abroad with a level of impunity that should shame Western governments. The 2018 Villepinte plot was the first case in which a serving diplomat was caught red-handed directing a terrorist attack in Europe. Instead of confronting Tehran’s state-sponsored terrorism, the Belgian government rewarded it by releasing Assadi in a hostage-swap deal, sending exactly the wrong message: if you take Europeans hostage, we will capitulate. Now, Tehran seeks to sanitize its reputation by rewriting the facts of the Villepinte plot through orchestrated propaganda, echoed uncritically by naïve journalists. This is not merely irresponsible; it is dangerous. Terrorists who attempt mass murder deserve neither sympathy nor a platform. They deserve condemnation, full stop.
Saadouni and Naami were not misguided amateurs. They were paid, trained, long-term MOIS agents entrusted with executing a mass-casualty terrorist attack in Europe. Their claims are lies. Their narrative is a fabrication. Their sudden monarchist pantomime is laughable. Europe must not allow its media to become the echo chamber of a terrorist state. The truth matters. The victims matter. And justice, already delivered in this case, must not be undermined by propaganda masquerading as reporting.
Struan Stevenson is the Coordinator of the Campaign for Iran Change (CiC). He was a member of the European Parliament representing Scotland (1999-2014), president of the Parliament's Delegation for Relations with Iraq (2009-14) and chairman of the Friends of a Free Iran Intergroup (2004-14). He is an author and international lecturer on the Middle East.