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Terry Glavin: 'Pursuing my murder' — Iranian dissident warned about those now charged in his death

Masood Masjoody was worried he was being targeted for his criticism of Tehran

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Masood Masjoody was a troubled man. Obnoxious, outlandishly paranoid and vexatiously litigious, the murdered 45-year-old former sessional math instructor at Simon Fraser University was long active in Iranian diaspora circles. He was ferociously militant in the cause of Iranian democracy.

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The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team came upon evidence suggesting foul play immediately after Masjoody’s neighbours reported to Burnaby RCMP on Feb. 2 that he had gone missing. On March 6, IHIT investigators assisted by police dogs and a search and rescue team discovered Masjoody’s remains in Mission, about an hour’s drive east of Metro Vancouver.

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On Friday, IHIT announced first degree murder charges against 48-year-old Mehdi Ahmadzadeh Razavi and 45-year-old Arezou Soltani, both of whom were well acquainted with Masjoody as activists on the margins of Metro Vancouver’s Iranian diaspora. In an online post last year, Masjoody claimed that Razavi and Soltani were “pursuing my murder.”

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According to IHIT Sgt. Freda Fong: “We understand this case has impacted the Iranian community and has generated widespread concern and public interest.”

You could call that an understatement.

Last year, owing to an acceleration in the Iranian regime’s determination to pursue its interests in Canada, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service moved to “reprioritize” its operations “to counter the actions of Iranian intelligence services and their proxies who have targeted individuals they perceive as threats to their regime.” LINK Because Masjoody was well known for raising loud alarms about the reach of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Canada, reports about his suspicious disappearance were immediately situated in that light.

Masjoody was an early supporter of the Farashgard network, established by young Iranians in exile in the wake of the 2017 uprising that spread to 140 towns and cities across Iran. Although later eclipsed by the Woman, Life Freedom movement of 2022, and wholly overshadowed by the protests of despair that broke out last December, the 2017 uprising was the largest convulsion in Iran since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power from the Shah of Iran in 1979.

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The Farashgard was a movement of the barandaz, “overthrowers” who drew a sharp distinction between themselves and Iran’s twinned Khomeinist establishment of “reformers” and “conservatives.” Avowedly liberal democratic, pluralistic and secular, the founders of Farashguard took a welcoming approach to the son of the shah, Reza Pahlavi, who they imagined as a potentially benign monarchist figurehead on the road to constitutional democracy.

Over the years, however, B.C. Supreme Court records show that Masood Masjoody’s activism turned to a kind of war on two fronts: against what he perceived to be covert Iranian involvement in SFU’s research facilities, and against a small circle of Pahlavists, among whom his accused killers Rozavi and Soltani situated themselves. Over the years, Pahlavi had changed, too, lately promoting a far larger role for himself in a post-Khomeinist Iran. His power would not be constrained in the manner of the British Crown, for instance. And there’s a distinctly nasty character at the sharper edges of Pahlavi’s network.

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In 2020, Masjoody lost his job at SFU over a workplace harassment complaint. After that, his activism ended up confined mostly to a frantic campaign of lawsuits, appeals, cross appeals and a brief hunger strike. What concerned Masjoody most was the suspiciously divisive role Reza Pahlavi and his supporters had come to play in the broad Iranian opposition in exile.

Masjoody came by his paranoia honestly.

Owing to the lax immigration rules inaugurated by the federal Liberals and an institutional bias in Ottawa favouring wealth migration, senior figures in the Iranian ruling class and their families found an easy time of it setting themselves up in Canada after Stephen Harper’s Conservatives were defeated at the polls in 2015.

It wasn’t until 2024 that the IRGC was placed on Canada’s terrorist list and senior Iranian officials were banned from Canada. This simply encouraged much of the Khomeinist elite that had settled here to engage in a “rebranding” exercise, often declaring loyalty to Reza Pahlavi. Conveniently positioned in the better neighbourhoods of Greater Toronto and Metro Vancouver, it was an easy transition.

By 2024, hopes for a broad-based international coalition of political leadership in the Iranian diaspora had already collapsed with the Pahlavists’ defection into a plan to install Reza Pahlavi as a kind of supreme leader in Tehran, ostensibly on a temporary basis. Pahlavi’s supporters have become increasingly “illiberal” and “thuggish” and quick to abuse anyone not entirely on board with Pahlavi’s program, according to the human rights lawyer and senior Macdonald-Laurier fellow Kaveh Shahrooz. 

Pahlavi’s supporters started glorifying the Savak, the deposed shah’s hated secret police, and calling for leftists to be put to death, Shahrooz wrote last week. “The cumulative effect permits his followers to indulge their most aggressive and vengeful impulses. Combined with a cult of personality forming around him, this is hardly the foundation for a liberal democracy.”

In a September 2024 lawsuit filed in B.C. Supreme Court, Masjoody alleged that Reza Pahlavi and the accused killer Razavi, along with several other individuals Masjoody identified as Pahlavi supporters, had defamed him, committed forgery and engaged in breaches of his privacy and acts of intimidation to the point of threatening his life.

Razavi’s co-accused Arezou Soltani is named in a separate 2024 lawsuit in which Masjoody alleged that she and others had defamed him by falsely linking him to the Khomeinist regime, to the Khomeinist proxy Hamas in Gaza, and also to the Mujahideen E-Kalkh, a militantly anti-regime organization struck from Canada’s terrorist listings in 2012.

In a posting on X, prominent Iranian-Canadian human rights activist Nazanin Afshin-Jam MacKay said she’d found herself defamed by some of the same individuals in conflict with Masjoody. Questions had been making rounds about whether certain Pahlavi supporters were genuine monarchists at all, Afshin-Jam said, “or regime affiliates pretending to be supporters.”

Masjoody played the starring role in at least 15 failed lawsuits and dismissed appeals since 2020. One of Masjoody’s few legal successes was a B.C. Supreme Court judgment last September against Pahlavi himself, for failing to file responses to two of Masjoody’s civil claims against him. Pahlavi eventually filed an affadavit to the effect that he resides at a security-restricted address in the State of Maryland, knew nothing about Masjoody, and was unaware of Masjoody’s civil claims.

Masjoody won a similar judgment last December against Soltani, who would go on to be named as a co-accused in his murder. For failing to appear in court to answer Masjoody’s claims against her, Soltani was fined $2000 last December.

Last year, after tossing a defamation suit Masjoody filed against the Burnaby Beacon, Appeals Court Justice Bruce Butler prohibited Masjoody from filing new appeals or reconstituting his existing court actions without permission from a judge. “His conduct bears many, if not all, of the hallmarks of vexatious litigation,” Judge Butler concluded.

The pattern was set with his loss in the 2020 workplace harassment case at SFU. Masjoody had long insisted INSISTED WHERE? HOW? that SFU was quietly harbouring individuals working with Iranian officials on research related to ballistic missile technology and nuclear weapons. When he lost his job over disruptive and insubordinate workplace conduct, Masjoody readily adopted the thesis that agents of the regime were behind his downfall.

There’s certainly nothing outlandish about the proposition that the Iranian regime’s spies and saboteurs are at work in Canada. Last November CSIS director Dan Rogers said his agency had been involved in more than one case of “detecting, investigating, and disrupting potentially lethal threats against individuals in Canada.” One such case was a threat on the life of former Justice Minister Irwin Cotler, Ottawa’s brief-term interlocutor on antisemitism and founder of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. In another case, a U.S. Department of Justice indictment alleged two Canadians were planning to conduct assassinations in the United States on behalf of Iran’s Intelligence services.

Nik Kowsar, the award-winning Iranian journalist and cartoonist who fled to Canada after being imprisoned for his work and threatened with death in Iran, recalled meeting Masjoody in Vancouver two years ago. Kowsar says he sympathizes with the early Farashgard activists who have become disillusioned with the Pahlavists.

Whatever else might be said about Masjoody, Kowsar wrote LINK PLEASE in a weekend essay, he was onto something. “I am not a judge or a jury, but I am a witness to the concerns Masood raised before he disappeared. In the wake of his death, those concerns deserve to be treated with the gravity they carry.”

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