A U-Haul truck plowed into anti-Islamic Republic regime protesters in Los Angeles, leading to multiple injuries.
Multiple videos of Sunday’s incident depicted an adult male driving the U-Haul truck straight at protesters. On the side of the vehicle are the words, “No shah, no regime, USA: don’t repeat 1953. No mullah.”
Bill Essayli, the first assistant US attorney for the Central District of California, said the FBI was working with the Los Angeles Police Department to determine the driver’s motive and that an active investigation was underway.
The LA Fire Department said two patients were evaluated on scene but declined treatment.
Many Iranians on social media have pointed out that the messaging on the side of the truck is commonly associated with supporters of the group MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq), an Iranian leftist, anti-regime, and anti-shah group now based in Albania. MEK founded and leads the National Council of Resistance of Iran. The group has been implicated in multiple violent acts against the Iranian regime.
It is associated, for instance, with the blowing up of the headquarters of the Islamic Republican Party in June 1981, which led to brutal retaliation, and the August 1981 bombing that killed Iran’s president Mohammed Ali Rajai and prime minister Mohammed Javad Bahonar.
MEK was listed as a terrorist organization in the US, Canada, the EU, the UK, and Japan until around 2013.
MEK's past acts of terror
When the organization was delisted in the US in 2012, the State Department said it did not overlook “or forget the MEK’s past acts of terrorism, including its involvement in the killing of US citizens in Iran in the 1970s and an attack on US soil in 1992.”
“The department also has serious concerns about the MEK as an organization, particularly with regard to allegations of abuse committed against its own members,” it continued.
It noted that the decision to delist the group “took into account the MEK’s public renunciation of violence, the absence of confirmed acts of terrorism by the MEK for more than a decade, and their cooperation in the peaceful closure of Camp Ashraf, their historic paramilitary base.”
Niyak Ghorbani, an Iranian dissident residing in the UK said the truck incident indicated that MEK has “reentered their terrorist phase.”
“It was a deliberate political act aimed at Iran’s national democratic movement, the very movement that has now become the MEK’s primary strategic threat,” Niyak Ghorbani said, adding, “The slogans displayed on the vehicle are not random. They are textbook MEK rhetoric.
“Whenever the collapse of the regime has appeared close, the MEK has done the same thing. It has turned its weapons on the Iranian people themselves. The MEK is once again moving into organized political violence,” Ghorbani said.
Iranian academic Sana Ebrahimi said the MEK is a Marxist-Islamist cult.
“They were armed enforcers of the Islamists during the 1979 revolution. [MEK leader] Masoud Rajavi stood next to [former supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini; there are photos, this is not debatable,” he said.
“When Khomeini pushed them aside, they went ballistic. During the Iran-Iraq War [1980-1988], they openly joined Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and helped kill Iranian civilians out of pure revenge and hunger for power.
“That’s why the MEK is despised across the entire Iranian political spectrum,” he said. “Monarchists, Republicans, Left, Right, we disagree on almost everything. One thing is unanimous: hatred for the MEK.”
However, despite extensive Internet speculation, LA Police Capt. Richard Gabaldon said officials do not believe the incident was politically motivated or an act of terrorism.
Gabaldon said the suspect, who has been detained, has no arrest record, but could face a charge of assault with a deadly weapon.
Estimates from the LA Regional Transportation Management Center indicate that at least 3,000 people were present in Westwood at the time of the incident.
“There’s a lot of various protests that are happening, and obviously, we want everybody to exercise their First Amendment right,” said LA Mayor Karen Bass. “But how one does that is critical, and exercising your First Amendment right peacefully is what is absolutely critical.”