Mohammad Hadi Mofatteh, the ex-head of the Islamic Center Hamburg (IZH), was supplied an expulsion order immediately, 5 weeks after German authorities prohibited the corporate, a consultant for Hamburg’s Interior Ministry claimed on Wednesday.
The order suggests the 57-year-old Shiite Muslim cleric has really been employed to go away Germany inside 2 weeks or be deported to his homeland– Iran– at his very personal expense, she claimed.
Mofatteh can also be prohibited to reenter Germany or make investments at any time within the nation. If he had been to disobey, he will surely cope with a jail sentence of roughly 3 years.
Fears of Iranian influence
The IZH, which Mottafeh headed from 2018 till its pressured closure in July, was thought of by German residential information authorities to be regulated by Iran.
In enhancement, the power marketed “an Islamist-extremist, totalitarian ideology in Germany,” German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser claimed in a declaration supplied to warrant the relocate to close it down.
“This Islamist ideology is opposed to human dignity, women’s rights, an independent judiciary and our democratic government,” she claimed, worrying, nonetheless, that the step was not guided versus Islam as a religion.
Her ministry claimed the IZH served as a “representative of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution” and unfold this perception in an “aggressive and militant way.”
Mottafeh was seen by Hamburg’s department of Germany’s residential information firm, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), as representing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Germany.
The outlawing of the IZH likewise consisted of the confiscation of the corporate’s standard “Blue Mosque,” situated in an upmarket location on the coast of the port metropolis’s Outer Alster Lake
The construction, formally known as the Imam Ali Mosque, is at present below the management of the German federal authorities.
This write-up makes use of reporting from the dpa data firm.
While you are proper right here: Every Tuesday, DW editors assemble what is happening in German nationwide politics and tradition. You can be a part of proper right here for the common e-mail e-newsletter Berlin Briefing.