Brussels official who tried to cancel Nigel Farage hosted ultra-radical Iranian mayor
Socialist Philippe Close pressured the venue hosting NatCon to shut the event down, but last year he hosted the mayor of the Iranian capital at Brussels' Town Hall.
The Mayor of the City of Brussels, who pressured the venue hosting the National Conservatism conference not to do so, hosted the mayor of the Iranian capital in June 2023, it has emerged.
Mayor Philippe Close of the Socialist Party reportedly pushed the Concert Noble to pull out from hosting the event a matter of days before it was due to start on April 16.
However, on June 12 2023 Close posted an image on X of a collection of mayors from around the world, including the mayor of Tehran, at the Brussels Urban Summit hosted at the Town Hall.
Tehran mayor Alireza Zakani was placed under sanctions by the UK in 2023 on the grounds that he had been "involved in the commission of serious human rights violations or abuses in Iran". He was also reportedly an Iranian paramilitary prior to becoming the capital city's mayor.
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According to Faces of Crime, Zakani was the chair of the Supreme Assembly of the paramilitary group Basij between 2016 and 2019.
Last year, weeks before attending the conference in Belgium, Zakani said that women who defied rules around wearing the hijab would be prevented from using the Tehran metro.
According to UAE outlet The National, Zakani said: "We will proceed according to the country’s laws in this regard. Our first step is issuing notices, then we issue warnings to the unveiled women, and in the third stage we prevent them from entering the metro stations."
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News about Zakani's invitation to the Brussels Town Hall comes after NatCon, attended by Nigel Farage, Suella Braverman, and British academic Matt Goodwin, was temporarily shut down after a local official called in the police.
Emir Kir, the mayor of Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, a municipality of Brussels where the event was being held, told Politico earlier today that he would "immediately take measures to ban" the event.
This was the third attempt to prevent NatCon from proceeding, after Mayor Close pressured Concert Noble to cancel the event, before the mayor of Etterbeek pushed the second choice venue - the Sofitel hotel - to cancel it too.
Despite authorities descending on the third choice of venue, police then appeared to back off.
Sky News' Darren McCaffrey who was the scene wrote on X: "Police now suggesting they won’t be dragging people out of NatConTalk conference in Brussels but rather their tactic is that they are not letting anyone else in and people can leave and not re-enter the venue. Meanwhile, Suella Braverman is continuing to deliver her speech."
