BRIEF ON IRAN
        Representative Office of
        The National Council of Resistance of Iran
        No. 364 Thursday, March 7, 1996



        3421 M Street NW #1032, Washington, DC 20007


Mullahs Resort to Intimidation to Ensure Large Turn Out in
Election Farce, from statement by NCR, March 6

        Terrified of the citizenry's protest actions on the
threshold of the parliamentary election farce, the mullahs'
regime has placed its state security and military forces
across the country on full alert and created a repressive
environment in the cities, reports from Iran say.
        In Zanjan (northwestern Iran), the authorities have
issued several directives and have placed all the Guards
and Bassij forces on full alert,  forbidding them to leave
their centers and garrisons until the end of the elections.
In Mashad and Arak the regime has deployed patrol units
and set up street check points to intimidate the public and
disperse any gathering.
        Despite the atmosphere of terror, people have
defaced and destroyed many election billboards and
posters. By writing slogans on the walls and distributing
leaflets in score of cities, including Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan,
Zanjan, Arak, Kashan, Zahedan, Ahwaz, Bushehr, Najafabad,
and Fassa, the resistance forces, have called on the people
not to vote. Previously, on January 10, Mr. Massoud Rajavi,
President of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, had
called on the Iranian people to boycott the elections.
        In fear of a full fledged boycott, the mullahs' regime
has resorted to different ploys to force the people to go to
the polling stations. In Tehran, Mashad, Isfahan, Najafabad
and Arak, the regime's agents have been purchasing
people's birth certificates to use them on election day in
several voting stations. By threatening not to distribute of
coupons for the most basic staples in some areas and
distributing coupons for some scarce commodities in
another areas, the clerics are attempting to coerce people
to vote on the election day.
        Meanwhile, amidst intensified feuding among various
internal factions of the regime, a number of candidates,
including Moghaddesian and Arani, were ordered arrested
in Tehran by the Interior Minister.


Elections Aggravate Schism in Top, Reuters, March 6

        TEHRAN - A Moslem clerical court in Iran on
Wednesday suspended the radical daily Salam until after
Friday's parliamentary election, a member of the
newspaper's editorial board said.
        "The Special Clergy Court suspended us for 48 hours,
but we were not told about the reason for the ban," the
board member, who declined to be identified, told Reuters.
        A source close to the newspaper told Reuters the
court stopped the distribution of Salam's issue on
Wednesday apparently for carrying an interview critical of
the Guardian Council, a clergy-based body which oversees
the elections.
        In the interview, Hadi Khamenei, a radical Moslem
cleric who is the younger brother of Iran's supreme leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had blasted the council for barring
many candidates from running in the elections, the source
said.
        Several groups and newspapers have criticized the
council for barring nearly 40 percent of the more than five
thousand candidates it screened for their allegiance to
Islam, Iran's constitution and the country's supreme
leader.
        Salam has moderated some of its views in the past
few years and, along with its criticism of government
policy, has taken up the defense of basic rights as
guaranteed in Iranian laws.
        It has opposed the banning of newspapers and
attacks by Islamic militants on bookshops deemed to
publish immoral works.
        Salam editor Abbas Abdi was held for more than a
year on undisclosed charges before being released in 1994.
        Hadi Khamenei was the director of the radical
Islamist daily Jahan-e Eslam until it was banned a year ago
on charges including affronting Islam and Iran's supreme
leader.


Mullahs' Regime Assassinates Two Sunni Clergymen in
Pakistan, from statement by NCR, March 6

        At 2:00 PM, local time, Monday, March 4, the clerical
regime's machine gun-touting terrorists attacked and
assassinated two Iranian Sunni clergymen in Karachi,
Pakistan.
        Abdol-Malek Mollahzadeh, 45, born in Zahedan, and
Abdol-Nasser Jamshid-Zehi, 25, from the city of Khash in
Iranian Baluchistan, were shot dead by four agents of the
mullahs' Intelligence Ministry in the Liari district near the
Civil hospital. A Pakistani woman passing by was also
wounded and is currently hospitalized.
        The terrorists immediately fled the scene in a
getaway car. A team of the mullahs' Intelligence Ministry
agents has been stationed in Pakistan since several weeks
ago....
        This is the clerics' second terrorist assault against
Sunni clergymen in one month....
        The National Council of Resistance of Iran strongly
condemns the murder of these Sunni clergymen and calls
on the government of Pakistan to arrest and punish the
Khomeini regime's terrorists. It further demands that
Pakistan close down the regime's diplomatic missions and
not allow the criminal mullahs to go on terrorist rampage
in that country....