NEWS)))))
Three men were executed in a prison in the restive city of Ahwaz, south-western Iran, the government-owned news agency Fars reported on Wednesday.The unnamed men were accused of involvement in deadly bombings in oil-rich Khuzestan Province more than a year ago. The province, which borders Iraq, has a large Arab population.The EU called on Tehran earlier this month to refrain from executing the three men.In January, authorities in Ahwaz hanged four men facing similar charges. Three other Arab men were also executed in December for alleged involvement in the attacks.Dissident Arab activists in Khuzestan have accused the government of setting up trump charges against Arab activists fighting against Tehran’s “repressive policies”.
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Four men were hanged in the Islamic Republic’s most notorious prison, a semi-official daily wrote on Wednesday.The four men were identified as 24-year-old Najmoddin, Mohammad, 27-year-old Behrouz, and Reza.They were hanged at dawn on Tuesday in Tehran’s Evin Prison, the hard-line daily Kayhan wrote.The four men were accused of social crimes.Evin Prison was built by the Shah’s regime as a maximum security prison to house political dissidents, but it became the Islamic Republic’s most dreaded gulag and the site of thousands of political executions.
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Switzerland has imposed sanctions on Iran for its failure to heed demands by the United Nations Security Council that it suspend its uranium enrichment activities, the website Swissinfo reported on Thursday. In December, the Security Council voted unanimously to slap sanctions on Tehran. The decision is binding for all member states of the UN.Complying with the UN order, the Swiss cabinet announced on Wednesday an embargo on all goods that could serve Iran's nuclear or ballistic missile programs. The Swiss authorities have also frozen a number of Iranian assets, the report said.The move came two days after Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey held informal discussions with Iranian regime’s national security chief Ali Larijani on the nuclear stand-off.
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An Iranian oil ministry helicopter crashed on Thursday in the southern province of Fars, leaving three people dead, the official news agency IRNA reported.The helicopter went down at approximately 9 a.m. local time near Shiraz Salt Lake.“The pilot and two flight technicians died in the crash”, Hamid Taqizadeh, a provincial official, told IRNA.He said that the helicopter, which belonged to the oil ministry, was heading from Shiraz to Gol-Gohar region in Sirjan.
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At least 11 members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) were killed in a bombing in the restive south-eastern province of Sistan-va-Baluchistan, state media reported on Wednesday, revising an earlier death toll of 18.The bomb exploded next to a bus belonging to the IRGC Ground Forces as it was traveling down Tharollah Boulevard in the city of Zahedan, close to the Pakistani border, the official news agency IRNA said.The government-run news agency Fars reported that the blast occurred at approximately 6.30 a.m. local time. The attack injured at least 34 other IRGC members.IRNA quoted Soltanali Mir, the provincial director general of political affairs, as saying that five individuals had been arrested in connection with the bombing. The state-run news agency ISNA reported that a sixth individual had also been arrested. Sistan-va-Baluchistan Province is home to Baluchis, a predominantly Sunni Muslim ethnic minority. Iran has witnessed escalating unrest since 2006 in areas populated by Baluchis, who complain of discriminatory and repressive policies by the theocratic regime.Since 2005 the Iranian authorities have stepped up executions in the restive province in what many Baluchis believe is a response to a spate of attacks by dissidents on government and security officials.A Baluchi group opposed to the government of Iran calling itself Jondollah has claimed responsibility for a string of armed attacks on government officials.In March, the group claimed responsibility for an armed attack on a convoy of government officials in Sistan-va-Baluchestan, which left 22 government and provincial officials dead and at least seven, including the governor of Zahedan, critically wounded.In April, Iran’s state-run media reported that security forces had killed the group’s leader Abdolmalek Reigi along with 11 of its members on the border with Afghanistan.The claim proved to be false after Reigi subsequently appeared on an Arabic-language satellite channel denying such rumours.The group claims that it does not target civilians.
