A recent article in today’s international edition of Der Spiegel reports on an interesting analogue, in Germany, to the Majid Kakavand case in France. Just as the court in France seems likely to deny the request by the U.S. for extradition, the German court has already refused a U.S. request to arrest a German citizen for allegedly illegal shipments from Germany to Iran by way of Malaysia.

U.S. investigators have been trying to get Germany to arrest and extradite a German citizen who allegedly belongs to a network smuggling U.S. electronic components to Iran to be used in roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan. But a German court is blocking the move.

The case has to do with temperature and humidity gauges as well as valves that regulate water flow – the kind of things you can pick up in any sanitation-equipment store.

What makes it unusual is that it also has to do with a request by American law-enforcement officials for their German counterparts to search through the office of a man they have in their sights and confiscate, in particular, “electronic data, written correspondence, invoices and lists of addresses.”

What’s more, these same officials would also like the Germans to extradite the suspect – a German citizen who, for legal reasons, can only be identified as “N.” – so he can face criminal charges in the U.S. As far as the Americans are concerned, the ethnic Iranian businessman from the northern German city of Kiel is an enemy of the state who deserves to be put in prison for up to five years

Well, even if Der Spiegel can’t reveal who “N.” is, we can. He’s Djamshid Nezhad. In September 2008, Mr. Nezhad was made a denied party (as part of the second wave of Mayrow General Trading designations) and was named as a defendant in this indictment in a federal court in Florida.

N. continues to plead his innocence and claims that this has all been a big mistake. But the U.S. is still investigating him. Last year, American officials unsuccessfully petitioned their German counterparts to detain N. Their hopes were stymied when an upper district court for the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, which is home to Kiel, blocked the request, saying it couldn’t find any factual basis that justified launching a criminal inquiry into N.’s deliveries. The court based its decision on the fact that both German and European law permits the exportation of the components he traded. “The subject is accused of doing something that does not constitute a criminal offense in Germany,” the court found.

Still, the court’s views aren’t wholeheartedly shared by German customs officials, who believe the parts N. ordered from the U.S. could certainly be classified as “dual-use,” thereby rendering their exportation illegal. “One should have applied for an export permit in this country depending on the specification of the components,” said one customs investigator.

What’s interesting here is that, as in the Kakavand case, the extradition request will depend on whether or not the items are on Germany’s list of dual-use items which, of course, is derived from the Wassenaar list, also implement by the U.S. in the Commerce Control List of dual-use items requiring export license. Note also that the U.S. is not claiming that Nezhad’s valves and gauges were used in IEDs shipped by Iran to Iraq. It’s likely that they didn’t. Instead, the government’s interest is based solely on the claim that he is part of a network of exporters, some of whom exported items that were used in the detonation mechanisms for the IEDs.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that the United States is not really expecting to win these cases as much as it is trying to send a message to potential exporters to Iran. The message is that the U.S. will do whatever it can to make your life difficult if you try to ship things from the U.S. to Iran. And if you do ship things to Iran, you might want to limit your international travel plans. Take the family from Germany to Disneyland? Not in this lifetime.

ABOVE: Majid Kakavand

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This blog has previously reported on the case of Majid Kakavand, both here and, most recently, here. Kakavand, an Iranian citizen, was provisionally arrested in March 2009 by French authorities at the request of the U.S. Government. The provisional arrest warrant alleged that Kakavand used a company of his in Malaysia to order electronic components from U.S. companies and then transshipped those components to Iran. On April 14, the French court will hold its sixth hearing on the US request for Kakavand’s extradition from France.

There has been almost no coverage of this case in the U.S. press. Most of the English-language press coverage of this case originates from the Government of Iran, which is, needless to say, a less than reliable source on matters such as this. But a recent French-language report from TF1 provides some interesting detail about the upcoming hearing on April 14.

First, the court has now received the reports on the exported items that it requested from French authorities, namely from the DGA, the French agency responsible for developing and procuring items for the French military, and from two bureaus of the Ministry of the Economy. Both agencies have reportedly concluded that the items exported by Kakavand from the United States to Iran (through Malaysia) were not dual-use items. If that is the conclusion of these two reports, it will mean that there is a good chance that the extradition request will be denied by the French court.

Second, Kakavand’s lawyers have now alleged that the U.S. government falsified documents that it presented to the French court in support of the extradition request. In addition, his lawyers claim that they are requesting prosecutors in San Francisco to investigate these allegations of document forgery. The basis for this claim of falsification seems, frankly, not very convincing. The lawyers allege that the U.S. submitted emails that had attachments with dates that did not correspond to the emails.

I suspect that on that basis alone most of my emails might be subject to a claim of falsification, because they often have attachments created before the date of the email. If the allegation is that the documents bore dates after the date of the email to which they were attached, there are also reasonable explanations for that. In particular, the date shown by the operating system for the attachment might reflect the last time it was accessed on a particular computer. Dates on pages of the document might be typographical errors. And, of course, if someone is going to forge documents, it is unlikely that such obvious discrepancies would be permitted in the forged documents. It would be like adding “1982” after the signature of a forged Vermeer.

In all events, even though I think the U.S. claim for jurisdiction to prosecute Kakavand for his activities in Iran and Malaysia is dubious, I don’t buy the notion that the U.S. Government would go so far as to falsify documents to support its request.