Britain must stop ‘appeasing’ Iran, warns Spanish politician who survived assassination attempt
A Spanish politician who survived being shot in the face at close range by a suspected Iranian-linked assassin has said the West must stop “appeasing” Tehran.
Alejo Vidal-Quadras, the co-founder of Spain’s Vox party, told The Telegraph that Britain needs to end all trade with the country, proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation and send urgent aid to the Iranian opposition.
Mr Vidal-Quadras, the former vice-president of the European Parliament, accused the Foreign Office of failing to take decisive action against the regime in order to keep lines of communication open.
On Nov 9 last year, Mr Vidal-Quadras was walking home from a “healthy walk in the park” when an assassin – who remains at large – called out: “Hello, sir.”
As he turned to reply, the gunman fired one bullet from a handgun, shattering the 78-year-old’s jaw and narrowly missing his neck and brain.
“I started bleeding a lot, there was a lot of blood on the floor, and then my consciousness started coming and going,” he said, adding that his assailant sped off on a motorbike driven by an accomplice.
“Then a gentleman that was passing by took off his jacket and put it against the wounds to stop them bleeding and within a few minutes the ambulance and the police arrived.”
After reconstructive surgery and 16 days in hospital, Mr Vidal-Quadras – who was previously placed on a sanctions blacklist by Tehran in October 2022 – was discharged with only slight blemishes on both cheeks to show for his narrow escape.
A total of five people have been arrested as part of the investigation into the shooting, including one British woman. They are yet to face trial.
The suspected gunman – a Tunisian resident of France with several previous convictions there – has not been caught.
Mr Vidal-Quadras has accused Iran of ordering the assassination because he is an outspoken opponent of the regime and supporter of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) committee, an exiled opposition group.
Maryam Rajavi, the NCRI’s president, said in a video address to a meeting in Parliament on Tuesday that the attack “showed that the clerical regime is a dangerous enemy of humanity”.
Mr Vidal-Quadras said the reluctance of Western governments – including Britain – to cut all ties with Iran has emboldened the autocratic regime and is partly to blame for its attack on him.
“In many foreign departments they believe there can be peace, they can negotiate,” he said. “Better an enemy that you can at least talk to than chaos.
“But this policy of appeasement has failed. They are a mortal enemy. We have done very stupid things with these people.
“They have a mentality where they always see appeasement, negotiation, constructive approach, as weakness. And then instead of appeasing them, they become more and more aggressive. They think, ‘they want to negotiate, that means we can attack even stronger’.”
The veteran conservative politician said Britain, the United States and the European Union urgently need to start treating Iran as a “pariah state”.
He called for all diplomats to be recalled from the country, wide-ranging sanctions to be imposed and all imports and exports to cease to “strangle them financially”.
“No diplomatic relations, no trade, nothing,” he said, adding that the “Iranian resistance and Iranian people” should be sent financial aid and offered overt political and diplomatic support.
“I have realised that the current policies are not only useless, but counter-productive,” he said, calling on the IRGC to be proscribed a terrorist organisation. “We have always taken the wrong way, trying to appease, trying to negotiate concessions.”
He led the centre-Right Popular Party (PP) in Catalonia for five years until 1996, when he left the post after his disagreement to a deal between his party leader, José María Aznar, the then-prime minister, and a Catalan nationalist party.
Known for his opposition to Catalan separatism, he continued to serve as an MEP for the PP between 1999 and 2014 but then failed to retain his seat that year when he ran for Vox, which has since become Spain’s third-largest political force.
