All Iranian schools will have compulsory prayer times starting from the new academic year, on the orders of the Education Ministry.All students will now have to take part in the daily ritual in communal halls, state-run media reported on Saturday which marked the first day of the Iranian school calendar.Under the new system, a call to prayers will be broadcast in loudspeakers on campuses.
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Iranian authorities have hanged three prisoners in the south-eastern city of Zahedan, the semi-official Jomhouri Islami reported on Tuesday.The three men, identified as Ali Karimi, Gholam Koohkan, and Khodamorad Lashkarzadeh, were accused of drug trafficking, the report said.They were hanged in prison on Sunday.Four other men, identified as Shah Mohammad, Nader Reigi, Abdol-Ali Baluch, and Mohammad Shakib, were hanged on Saturday in Zahedan Prison.Iranian authorities routinely execute dissidents on the bogus charge of drug smuggling.Zahedan is the provincial capital of Sistan-va-Baluchestan which has been a hotbed of anti-government activities.The Iranian authorities have stepped up executions in this restive province in what many Baluchis believe is a response to a spate of attacks by dissidents on government and security officials.
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The international human rights group Amnesty International is "greatly concerned" by a continuing crackdown by Iranian authorities against rights activists, according to a statement released by the group on Monday."Amnesty International is greatly concerned by new arrests and detentions in Iran targeting human rights activists, minority community activists and others peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression and association", the group said. The statement said that in recent days at least 10 people were detained for seeking to demonstrate against the imminent execution of four women. More than 15 Iranian Azeris had been detained for advocating a school's boycott at the start of the new academic year, it added. "On 24 September at least 10 people were detained while demonstrating peacefully outside the United Nations office in Tehran. They were protesting against the expected imminent execution of several women, including Kobra Rahmanpour, Fatemeh Haghighat-pajouh, Nazanin Fatehi and Shahla Jahed". "Amnesty International is calling on the Iranian authorities immediately to cease arrests and harassment of those peacefully exercising their rights, including human rights defenders, and to ensure that all persons in detention are protected from torture or other ill-treatment", it said.
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State Security Forces (SSF) in the western city of Hamedan have announced that they would crack down on people eating in public during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.Flyers distributed across the city by the SSF and the Ministry of Justice state that anyone spotted to be eating food in public would be arrested and handed over for prosecution.According to some report, residents had been threatened by agents of the SSF that they would be forced to dig graves as punishment for eating in public.The punishment is meant to force those arrested to consider the prospect of death and the afterlife in order to refrain from breaching Islamic regulations. Ramadan, which started on Monday in Iran, will last for one month. In this period Muslims are required to fast during daylight. In previous years, people caught eating in public in Iran during the month of Ramadan, have been flogged in public or sentenced to jail time.
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Iranian authorities have hanged four men in the south-eastern province of Sistan-va-Baluchestan, according to a state-run daily.The four men, identified as Shah Mohammad, Nader Reigi, Abdol-Ali Baluch, and Mohammad Shakib, were hanged on Saturday in Zahedan Prison, the hard-line daily Khorassan wrote on Sunday.Iran’s judiciary in Zahedan also sentenced two women and one man to execution.Also in the north-eastern city of Mashad, the judiciary sentenced a man, identified only by his first name Hossein, to execution.
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A prisoner was hanged in the troubled province of Sistan-va-Baluchestan, south-eastern Iran, the state-run daily Etemaad reported on Saturday.The man, identified only as Mohammad Sh., was hanged inside a prison in the city of Zahedan on Friday, the report said.It added that the man was charged with drug trafficking.Iranian authorities routinely execute dissidents on the bogus charge of drug smuggling.
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London, Sep. 28 – Agents of Iran’s State Security Forces went up rooftops in western Tehran removing satellite dishes which are banned in Iran.“At around 10 am on Tuesday, uniformed agents began climbing rooftops and they started to remove satellite dishes”. Dozens of dishes were brought down and confiscated by security agents in the police operation which occurred in Tehran’s Kaj District (formerly Peykan-Shahr). Last month the chief of the great Tehran said: People’s roof top is not a private property.
The Islamic Republic banned satellite dishes in 1995. The crackdown on satellite dishes was prompted by broadcasts from Iranian opposition groups whose television programs reportedly have a large audience in Iran.
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Dozens of unpaid workers held a protest on Thursday outside the governorate of oil-rich Khuzestan Province, southwest Iran, demanding the government put pressure on their employers to pay their overdue wages.Some 50 workers from the Jangineh Brick Baking Factory took part in the rally outside the governorate in Ahwaz, the provincial capital of Khuzestan. The protestors claimed that they had not received their wages for the past 12 months.“We are forced to work but are not being paid. If we quit now then we will have no hope of getting our back-wages for the past year. What choice do we have?” said one disgruntled worker. “We have not even been given our annual bonuses for the past two years”, he complained.Another worker who was visibly distraught said that he had been forced to get a night job to be able to support his wife and children.“Is this justice? We have rights too”, he chanted before breaking down in tears. “I don’t even have enough money to replace my son’s torn shoes”.Hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had run in the presidential campaign on a platform of purging corruption, mismanagement, and poverty in society but Iran experts say that workers in the country have since become in a greater state of financial flux.
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An Iranian court in the north-eastern city of Mashad sentenced a man to have one of his eye’s gouged out as punishment for blinding another man during a scuffle, state-run press reported.The defendant, identified only by his first name Amir, was sentenced by the court to have his left eye gouged out, the hard-line daily Quds wrote in its Tuesday edition. It added that Amir was found guilty of blinding a man identified as Mehdi in one eye during a scuffle they had in the open.Amir, who is currently languishing in jail, was also sentenced to 74 lashes and prison time.The phrase “An eye for an eye” is very stringently adhered to in Iran’s Islamic law.
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London, Sep. 30 – Agents of Iran’s dreaded Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) have arrested the daughter of a Christian priest whose high-profile murder 12 years ago was met with international condemnation, a Christian news agency reported on Friday.Fereshteh Dibaj, 28-year-old daughter of Reverend Mehdi Dibaj, was arrested on Tuesday with her husband Reza Montazami, 35, in their home in the north-eastern city of Mashad, the news agency Compass Direct News reported.The report said that secret agents raided their apartment at 7 am and transferred the couple to a local intelligence branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Their six-year-old daughter was reportedly in the apartment at the time.The couple lead an independent house church in Mashad, where the government executed a convert Christian pastor in 1990, it said.In July 1994, Mehdi Dibaj, a minister of the Assemblies of God who had converted from Islam, was murdered in a gruesome manner along with two Christian bishops. Prior to his murder, Rev. Dibaj had spent more than nine years in prison, on the charge of "apostasy". Tehran initially blamed the 1994 murders on the opposition Mojahedin-e Khalq (MeK) and brought several former members of the group on television to testify that they were responsible for the killings.But in the aftermath of the 1997 “serial murders” of dissidents and intellectuals in Iran, which for the first time lifted the lid on numerous killings by the Intelligence Ministry, journalist Akbar Ganji shed light on the murders, revealing that it had been an “inside-job” sanctioned on the orders of Deputy Intelligence Minister Saeed Emami and carried out by a team under the command of Mahmoud Saeedi.Officials in the Khatami administration later acknowledged that the murders of Bishop Haik Hovsepian Mehr, Bishop Tateos Michaelian, and Reverend Mehdi Dibaj were politically-motivated killings by the MOIS to tarnish the image of the Iranian opposition group.
