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A man was hanged in the restive city of Ahwaz, south-west Iran, state-media reported. The man identified as 32-year-old Abbas A. was hanged after he was convicted of armed robbery of livestock, the government-run news agency Fars reported on Monday.Two other men identified as 45-year-old Hamid Kh. and 37-year-old Ali S. were also sentenced to death for taking part in the thefts.The report said that their sentences would soon be carried out in public.Ahwaz, the Arab-dominated provincial capital of oil-rich Khuzestan Province, has been the scene of unremitting anti-government protests since early 2005.
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The European Union expressed “grave concern” on Thursday over the lack of press freedoms in Iran. “The European Union expresses its grave concern about the worsening situation with regard to the freedom of the press in Iran”, a statement by the 25-nation block’s Finnish Presidency said.It highlighted the banning of four dailies in Iran on September 11, including the state-controlled Sharq.The decision to ban the dailies was “especially alarming given the already limited freedom of the press in Iran”, it said, adding, “The European Union finds the continued harassment of journalists, such as threats of prosecution, extremely worrying”.The EU called on the Iranian authorities to comply with their obligations to respect the freedom of the press and to allow Iranian journalists to practice their profession without harassment or intimidation.
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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 last Friday.Fereshteh Dibaj, 28-year, 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 led 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 agents of the regime posed as the former members of the group on television to testify that they were responsible for the killings.But in the aftermath of the 1997 “chain 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.
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United Press International According to a report by United Press International dated Sep 30th a newly disclosed letter from Ayatollah Khomeini written in 1988 says that Iran would need nuclear weapons to win the war with Iraq. Former President Hashemi Rafsanjani released the letter as part of a feud with a military commander over responsibility for the 1988 cease-fire between Iran and Iraq, the BBC reports. In the letter, Khomeini, who died in 1989, quotes the country's leading military commander of the day on the weaponry, Iran would need to continue fighting. The letter also reveals that Iran's economy had been almost destroyed by the eight-year war and that the supply of military volunteers was drying up. The letter strikes a nerve because the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has denied that Iran plans to develop nuclear weapons. He has said that such weapons would violate Islamic principles. But the letter suggests that Khomeini, leader of Iran's Islamic Revolution, had no such qualms.
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More than 4,000 birds have mysteriously died near a city in the north-western Iranian province of West Azerbaijan, a state-run daily reported yesterday. The 4,000 deaths took place over the past two weeks close to a dam on the Aras River, near the city of Maku, the daily Aftab-e Yazd wrote in its Thursday edition.The report ruled out Bird Flu as the possible cause of the deaths.It said that specimens of the dead birds were sent to laboratories in Britain to investigate the cause. The Iranian regime has denied cases of bird flu in Iran since the news of the bird flu broke internationally.
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