NEWS)))))
A man was hanged in public in the south-eastern Iranian city of Kerman, state media reported on Thursday. The man was identified as Ramezan Ebrahimi. He was accused of taking part in armed clashes with state security forces.
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Associated Press reported the Iranian regime announced Monday that it has begun enriching uranium with 3,000 centrifuges, defiantly expanding a nuclear program that has drawn U.N. sanctions and condemnation from the West. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at a ceremony at the enrichment facility at Natanz that Iran was now capable of enriching nuclear fuel "on an industrial scale." Asked if Iran has begun injecting uranium gas into 3,000 centrifuges for enrichment, top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani replied, "Yes." He did not elaborate, but it was the first confirmation that Iran had installed the larger set of centrifuges after months of saying it intends to do so. Until now, Iran was only known to have 328 centrifuges operating. Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, said the U.N. Security Council and the U.N. nuclear watchdog group "don't believe Iran's assurances that their (nuclear) program is peaceful in nature." "Iran continues to defy the international community and further isolate itself by expanding its nuclear program, rather than suspending uranium enrichment," said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council. The United Nations has vowed to ratchet up sanctions as long as Iran refuses to suspend enrichment. The Security Council first imposed limited sanctions in December, then increased them slightly last month and has set a new deadline of late May.
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At least 30 people were killed and 14 others injured when a truck slammed into a passenger bus on a highway between the western Iranian cities of Ilam and Kermanshah on Sunday.Seventeen of those killed in the accident were men and 13 were women, a report in the state-run news agency Fars said on Monday, raising the original death toll of 26 that was announced on state television last night.Iran's highways are considered to be among the most dangerous in the world, with some 100,000 road-accident deaths occurring in the last five years, the equivalent of three deaths an hour.
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Tehran, Iran, Apr. 10 – A radical Islamist with a dark and chequered past has been appointed Iran’s defence attaché in the Balkans, the state-run daily Etemaad Meli reported on Monday.Hossein Allahkaram, a brigadier general in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, will serve as defence attaché in the Balkans for four years, the daily quoted an “informed source” as saying.Allahkaram is the leader and one of the founders of Ansar-e Hezbollah, a paramilitary force that acts as the clerical regime’s storm troopers to put down anti-government demonstrations and instil terror in members of the public. Iranian officials have conceded in the past that the group has been organized and led by close confidants of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, such as Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati.In a revealing account of his years as a member of the leadership council of Ansar-e Hezbollah, defector Amir Farshad Ebrahimi wrote that Allahkaram had been given the go-ahead by the Supreme Leader himself in a meeting in autumn 1992 to form an Iranian version of the Lebanese group Hezbollah.In September 2005, Allahkaram announced his support for suicide operations against the West. “At a time when the American government insists on the existence of a ‘military option’ against Iran, one cannot be opposed to martyrdom-seeking operations”, he told Baztab, a Persian-language website run by former top Revolutionary Guards commanders.
