How Did This Pass Immigration Vetting?

When the Albanese government recklessly hand-waved thousands of Hamas supporters, oops, ‘Palestinians’, into Australia, Home Affairs Minister (and Muslim vote dependent) Tony Burke swore they’d been ‘thoroughly vetted by security agencies’. In reality, they’d simply answered a short phone questionnaire, not conducted by ASIO but by immigration officials.

We also know that multiple individuals linked to the Ayatollah regime and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), now banned as a designated terror group, have been allowed into Australia. Despite praising and promoting violent jihad, and hosting senior officials of terror group Hezbollah, these Iranian proxies have been repeatedly hosted at state parliaments and endorsed by Labor government figures.

Now, yet more individuals linked to the regime are emerging in Australia.

The daughter of a senior Iranian diplomat accused of smuggling money for Hezbollah into Lebanon is working as an analyst for Queensland Health and has earned Australian citizenship.

The Australian can reveal computational biologist Atefeh Taherian Fard, a health academic who rose through the ranks at the University of Queensland over more than a decade, is the daughter of Iran’s former ambassador to Turkey, Mohammad Ebrahim Taherian Fard.

International media linked Mr Fard to a regime-run money laundering racket where diplomats would travel into Lebanon through Beirut Airport carrying suitcases stuffed with American dollars to soften Hezbollah’s funding shortfall after Israel’s relentless campaign against it and the 2024 ground invasion.

Dr Fard is the second child of a regime official implicated in terror offences found by this masthead to be living in Australia. Western democracies have become increasingly vigilant to the presence of regime gentry living abroad.

As well they should. The Iranian regime has been linked to terror activities in Australia and abroad. It is also behind much of the violent anti-Semitism since October 2023. Several suspected ‘sleeper agent’ terror attacks have been carried out in Western countries since the beginning of the Iran war.

Arriving in Australia in the early 2010s, Dr Fard studied a doctorate of philosophy at UQ, before pursuing postdoctoral research fellowships – first at the Queensland University of Technology, then UQ’s Institute for Bio­engineering and Nanotechnology.

The Australian understands she was granted citizenship in 2019 when former opposition leader Peter Dutton was home affairs minister.

Her former husband is another Iranian who has risen high in the public service.

Like his former wife, [Shahin Firouztash] has a career in the public service. A procurement specialist, he worked at Queensland Rail, the state Department of Agriculture and Brisbane City Council. He spent the last year with Brisbane’s Metro North Health district.

There is no suggestion Dr Fard or Mr Firouztash engaged in any wrongdoing or support the Iran­ian regime and its actions.

Except…

“In January 2020, when (Don­ald) Trump ordered the elimination of General Qasem Soleimani, (she) acted peculiarly yet again. Atefeh remained silent while Shahin seemed to carefully mock the subject.”

It drove a wedge and [the source] cut off contact, he said, becoming convinced he couldn’t detach the couple from the regime they grew up in.

“Those children are not entitled to the comforts, abundance, and amenities of a Western democracy while their parents have made life a veritable abyss for the mainstream Iranians,” he said.

“There is a broader and deeply felt concern within the Iranian Australian community regarding what appears to be a systemic failure of due diligence on the Department of Home Affairs’ part in the vetting of individuals closely connected to senior figures of the Islamic Republic.

“The apparent lack of rigorous scrutiny concerning immediate family ties to high-ranking regime officials – many of whom operate within opaque networks that blend diplomatic, military, and intelligence functions – has caused significant alarm.”

Once might have been a coincidence, but there seems to be a sustained failure of diligence on the part of immigration officials.

In February, this masthead revealed the daughter of former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps chief Yahya Rahim Safavi had been granted permanent residency and provisional health qualifications, despite sustained warnings to Home Affairs and the Albanese government.

Psychologist Hanieh Safavi had lived in both Townsville and Melbourne while her father supported the late ayatollah Ali Khamenei as his most senior military adviser.

General Safavi is one of the most senior regime figures left alive since the US-Israel strike on Iran and gave an interview to state TV early in hostilities, where he claimed Iran had “complete oversight” of foreign targets and knew “the locations of (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu’s meetings”.

The US Department last month offered a $10m bounty for information on General Safavi through its Rewards for Justice program. He is fifth on a list of IRGC key leaders.

So, the bureaucracy has plenty of time to ban comedians, rappers and gender-critical feminists, but the scions of a fanatical, anti-Semitic terror regime can slither into the country with ease.