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TEHRAN - A top conservative Iranian cleric on Friday denied the government was responsible for the police attack on a Tehran University dormitory last month that sparked six days of bloody riots.
"The attack on the university was certainly a mistake, but it was a mistake committed by the officers involved and had nothing to do with the regime," said Ayatollah Ahmad Janati, secretary of Iran's constitutional council.
He rejected any "link between the Islamic republic and the police" or the Islamic hard-liners who also attacked the students during a demonstration against the closure of a leading pro-reform newspaper.
Newspapers said at least five people were killed and dozens wounded, many of whom they said were later abducted from Tehran hospitals by the secret police.
The Islamic students council at Tabriz
University said 15 people were shot, including three women, and 80 other
people injured in savage beatings by security forces and militants.
Paper Slams Argentina over Terrorist Bombing, Agence France Presse, August 23
TEHRAN - An Iranian newspaper lashed out at Argentina on Monday after the Argentine vice president renewed charges that Tehran was behind the deadly 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires.
The English-language Iran News attacked Argentine Vice President Carlos Ruckauf for "bringing up this dead issue"
The paper also said Tehran had "replaced" Germany with Italy and France as its major trade partners in Europe and warned that "Argentina could also be replaced with other countries if it keeps up its anti-Iran rhetoric."
Ruckauf alleged in a court deposition Friday that "sectors of the Iranian government were responsible" for the July 1994 bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association that killed 86 people and wounded some 300 others.
A judge had demanded the deposition after Ruckauf stated publicly that he knew who was behind the attack, which has never been solved.
The attack came two years after the
Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires was bombed, killing 29 and injuring 200.
Mullahs Step up Executions to Further Terrorize People After Popular Uprising, Iran Zamin News Agency, August 21
On the morning of Wednesday, August 18, the clerical regime hanged four prisoners in Tehran’s Qasr Prison, while three others had their executions postponed "until the victims’ families attend the execution."
One of those hanged was Touraj Molahezekar,
aged 20, who was only 15 at the time of the crime he is alleged to have
committed. The mullahs’ regime has provided no information on the trial
of these prisoners. The mullahs’ regime also executed 10 people in Isfahan
on August 5 and 6.
Clerics’ Special Court Acquits Ex-hostage-taker, Reuters, August 23
TEHRAN - Abbas Abdi, a newspaper editor who was among the militant occupiers of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, has been acquitted of defamation charges, newspapers reported on Monday.
"The court does not recognize the occurrence of a crime," the special public court in the holy Shi'ite Moslem city of Qom said in its verdict.
Abdi told his critics that, had their conservative candidate Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri won the 1997 presidential election, they would now be escorting U.S. delegations with open arms.
Abdi was among the militants who held
52 Americans hostage for 444 days at the embassy.
Jailing of Tehran Official Upheld, Reuters, August 21
TEHRAN - An Iranian court has rejected an appeal by a former top Tehran municipal official who was sentenced to prison, lashes and a hefty fine for graft, the official Iranian news agency IRNA reported.
It said the Tehran justice department on Saturday confirmed an earlier court ruling convicting Gholamreza Qobeh of embezzlement and misappropriation of public funds in a case which has been at the center of a bitter factional fight in Iran.
Qobeh was sentenced by a court in June to nine years in prison and 50 lashes of the whip. In addition, he was ordered to pay fines of 200 billion rials, worth about $66.7 million at the official exchange rate, and was banned for life from holding public office.