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11th September 2023
05:39pm BST
A parliamentary researcher arrested after being accused of spying for China once roleplayed as Iran at a Model United Nations Conference.
The man attended a Model United Nations (MUN) conference in Edinburgh, in 2012, representing Iran on a Media committee.
Model UN is a simulation of the UN General Assembly where school pupils act as delegates from different countries while debating topics such as gender equality, economics, and climate change.
Here PoliticsJOE’s politics producer Ed Campbell reveals his close call with Mr Z at two Model UN Conferences.
Attending Model UN conferences as a teenager, you quickly learn how many weird gimps are out there and, importantly, how to avoid them.
What no one prepares you for are the warning signs you could be participating in a Model United Nations conference with a future spy for the Chinese.
I met Mr Z at Model UN Conference in Edinburgh in 2012.
He was representing Iran and I was representing Brazil on the media committee.
After he was arrested I looked back at his posts on the Facebook group set up for delegates to the conference - and what I found shocked me.
In a chilling portent, he shamelessly admits to representing Iran and asks for other people he met to add him as a friend.
Mr Z also claimed that a friend “bagged himself an underager” at the conference’s Saturday night disco, calling him a “top boy.”
In another post, Mr Z claimed that he was “honestly just a snatch hoover” at MUN conferences.
Another post suggests that while Mr Z was representing the Islamic Republic of Iran, he compared another delegate’s resolution to “lesbian sex.”
He reportedly said, “This resolution is a lot like lesbian sex, a lot of huffing and puffing with very little penetration.”
Sex between women in Iran is punishable by up to 100 lashes.
After another conference in 2013, Mr Z messaged me asking for a girl from my school’s name to add on Facebook.
He then asked me if I had enjoyed the conference before chillingly revealing he had been relieved to miss the conference’s Saturday night disco. This is chilling because the disco was always the highlight for teenagers desperate to finger each other in a school corridor after hours.
In fact, the previous year Mr Z had posted that a friend was looking forward to “slipping a few digits on the dancefloor at the MUN conference!"
Mr Z who was "well groomed with a big cheeky smile", was just like any other bright and attractive Model UN attendee in his teens. That’s why my jaw dropped when I learned he’d been arrested in March on spying allegations.
If someone so into Model UN and posting shit on Facebook groups could live a double life and lie like this, who can we really trust?
I had a lucky escape with Mr Z - but what if the next person, or far more importantly, the country, doesn’t.
