To prevent further scandal, Khatami urges the press not to report on Ministry of Intelligence

In a confidential meeting last Thursday with a number of newspaper editors and proprietors, mullahs' president Mohammad Khatami urged that they refrain from further reporting on the ghastly murders in recent weeks and the role of the regime's officials, reports from Iran say. He also asked them not to criticize the Intelligence Ministry.

The regime's inevitable admission to the role of the Intelligence Ministry in these crimes has led to a major scandal for the mullahs' anti-human regime and severely undermined one of the regime's main organs of suppression.

To prevent any crack in the wall of repression, Khatami heaped praise on the Ministry's henchmen and torturers. He is also trying to prevent these revelations from implicating the Guards Corps, and other organs and leaders of the regime, including Khamenei and himself.

As regards KhatamiÕs position vis-a-vis the recent murders and his attempts to conceal the true identities of those ordering or perpetrating these crimes, National Council of Resistance President Massoud Rajavi said: These realities show that as far as human rights abuses and suppression of the Iranian people are concerned, there is no difference whatsoever between Khatami and other factions of this anti-human regime. KhatamiÕs rhetoric about Òcivil societyÓ and the Òrule of lawÓ is only a deception.

Mr. Rajavi added: If Khatami were true to his words, he should have first and foremost dissolved the Intelligence Ministry and the Guards Corps, which are the embodiment of savagery, barbarism and outlaw behavior, and arrested and prosecuted those criminals whose hands are stained with the blood of 120,000 martyrs of the Iranian Resistance.

Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
January 11, 1999

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