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Iranian agents are spying on opponents of the Islamic regime in Germany, German media reports say.
"We know that the Iranian secret service has its people circulating in demonstrations," a TV report on German public broadcaster ARD quoted the deputy head of German intelligence in Hamburg, Manfred Murck, as saying. "We have evidence that people are being filmed, that the services want to identify people."
The TV report also stated the German foreign ministry had said that Tehran had urged the German Foreign Ministry to prevent anti-Iranian demonstrations in Europe. Ali Reza Sheikh Attar, Iran's ambassador to Germany, denied those allegations.
"There has been no letter or written message from us on this. There have been a lot of lies spread in the media about the protests," he told ARD.
But Iranian opposition figures in Europe claim they have been photographed, filmed and even hassled by Iranian agents.
Javad Dabiran, a spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which is leading the protests in Europe, told United Press International in a telephone interview Friday that Iranian expatriates who have taken part in anti-regime demonstrations in Europe have received threatening phone calls, that people are arrested when they visit relatives back in Iran, and that those relatives are hassled by Iranian authorities.
"They are trying to intimidate people," Dabiran told UPI.
Dabiran has helped organize anti-regime protests in Berlin that were surveyed by Iranian spies, he claims.
A bearded Iranian man driving a black Mercedes with a diplomat's license plate recently filmed the protesters, Dabiran said. When police asked the man why he was filming, he said it was for "private purposes," Dabiran told UPI.
 The NCRI is an umbrella organization representing the People's Mujahedin of Iran, which Tehran and the United States list as a terror organization. It was founded in 1965 in opposition to the shah but was squashed by the mullah regime that took power in 1979. It remains one of the main opposition groups to the current regime in Tehran. Most of the PMOI members live in Camp Ashraf in Iraq, where they were disarmed by U.S. troops in 2003. The European Union removed the group from its terrorist list in January after Britain had done so last year.
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