PARIS, June 17: French police on Tuesday launched a major crackdown on the leading Iranian armed opposition group, the People’s Mujahedeen, detaining more than 150 people in a series of dawn raids in the Paris region.

Among those arrested in the operation — described by the French interior ministry as one of the biggest undertaken by the domestic intelligence services in the last 30 years — was the group’s figurehead, Maryam Rajavi.

More than 1,200 officers targeted 13 locations in the northwestern outskirts of Paris, including the European headquarters in the town of Auvers-sur-Oise of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) — a political umbrella group dominated by the People’s Mujahedeen.

“The Mujahedeen wanted to make France their rear base — we couldn’t accept that,” Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said of the group, considered by the United States, the European Union and Iran to be a “terrorist” organization.

Interior ministry officials explained that the group, deprived of support from Saddam Hussein following the US-led toppling of the Iraqi government in April, had made the Auvers-sur-Oise compound its international base.

In Tehran, Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi hailed the raids as a “positive step on the part of France,” adding: “We are expecting France to treat these people as dangerous terrorists.”

But People’s Mujahedeen spokesman Ali Safavi said the allegations were “absolutely preposterous”, accusing Paris of launching the raid to “curry favour with the fundamentalist regime in Iran”.

A spokesman for the group in Baghdad, Hossein Madani, demanded the immediate release of those detained, calling on French President Jacques Chirac to step in to secure their freedom.

Officials said Tuesday’s operation, ordered by France’s leading anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere as part of an investigation dating back to 2001, had effectively dismantled the group’s infrastructure in France.

Sarkozy said 159 people were being held in preventive detention, as police continued to search the cluster of buildings targeted. Six people detained in the raids were later released.

Police said they had uncovered about 1.3 million dollars in 100-dollar notes and extensive amounts of computer equipment in one villa. Another 150,000 euros was found in a separate safe.

It was not immediately clear why the French authorities chose on Tuesday to act on the People’s Mujahedeen, given the group’s long history in France.

The raids came as the Iranian government confronted anti-regime protests by reformers at home and demands from abroad to open up the country’s nuclear program to international controls.

The authoritative Le Monde newspaper said the arrests were linked to the dispersal of mujahedeen fighters from Iraq after the US victory there, and were of a “pre-emptive nature, aiming to prevent mujahedeen from coming to France and the preparation of attacks against Iranian interests.”

French intelligence sources said they did not have any evidence indicating that the group’s members were planning to commit attacks in France.

Court sources said investigators were more focused on the movement of large sums of money in and out of accounts linked to the group, saying they could amount to the “financing of terrorist activity”.

Intelligence agents believe the funds may have been used to purchase arms, finance terror attacks or pay for trips by militants to training camps.

With a program that combines left-wing and Islamic ideology, the People’s Mujahedeen took part in the 1979 revolution in Iran, but the movement was suppressed in the years that followed and its members fled abroad.

Maryam Rajavi was joint leader of the People’s Mujahedeen in the late 1980s but resigned after being made “president-elect” for a future Iranian government by the NCRI in 1993.

Under the leadership of Rajavi’s husband Massoud, the military wing of the group took refuge in Iraq in 1986, from where it organized attacks inside Iran.

After driving Saddam from power in April, US troops reached a ceasefire with People’s Mujahedeen forces in Iraq, who began turning over their heavy weapons and placing thousands of fighters under US control.

But the US administration has made clear it does not foresee a role for the organization in destabilizing the Islamic government in Tehran.

Diplomatic sources in Baghdad said that at the start of the US military action in Iraq, the People’s Mujahedeen had sent many of its leaders to Europe — notably to France.

The whereabouts of Massoud Rajavi remained unknown, they said, but the group’s spokesman in London insisted he was still in Iraq.

Massoud Rajavi’s brother Saleh, the leader of the French wing of the operation, was among those arrested on Tuesday. —AFP