NEWS))))))
Three men were hanged in public at dawn on Saturday in southern Iran, the state-run news agency ISNA reported. Einollah G., Abdolrahman N., and Abol-Hassan Sh. - aged 55, 33, and 38 respectively - were hanged in the port city of Bandar Abbas. They were accused of drug trafficking. Iranian authorities routinely execute dissidents on bogus charges such as armed robbery and drug smuggling.
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Authorities hanged a man in the volatile province of Sistan-va-Baluchistan, south-eastern Iran, a semi-official daily reported.Ghader Radsar was hanged in a prison in the provincial capital of Zahedan on Thursday, the hard-line daily Kayhan wrote on Saturday.Radsar had been charged with illegal drug possession, the report said.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 2006, 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.
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A member of Iran’s para-military Bassij force was killed on Sat. according to the semi-official daily Kayhan.Kayhan said that the Bassij agent, identified as Gholam-Reza Zabouni, was killed during a shootout with “armed robbers” in the Iranian capital.The Bassij, affiliated to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), are Islamist vigilantes loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In 2005, following hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rise to the presidency, they were given powers to act as the country’s back-up police force.Iranian authorities routinely execute dissidents on bogus charges, such as armed robbery and drug smuggling.
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Reuters reported: the Iranian regime has begun producing nuclear fuel in its underground uranium enrichment plant, a confidential U.N. atomic watchdog document said on Wednesday, ratcheting up its defiance of the United Nations. The paper, obtained by Reuters, also said Tehran had started up more than 1,300 centrifuge machines, divided into eight cascades, or networks, in the Natanz complex, in an accelerating campaign to lay a basis for "industrial scale" enrichment. Tehran says it seeks only nuclear-generated electricity. But its past concealment of sensitive enrichment research from the International Atomic Energy Agency and continued stonewalling of IAEA inquiries have shaken confidence in its intentions. IAEA ‘s document said, inspectors conducted a "design information verification" at the plant on April 15-16 and were informed that eight cascades -- 1,312 centrifuges in all -- were running and "some" uranium was being fed into them.The three-paragraph note by IAEA deputy director Olli Heinonen also said Iran had stopped letting inspectors verify design work at the Arak heavy water reactor, under construction and due for start-up in 2009. Centrifuges spin at supersonic speed to produce fuel for power plants or, if enriched to high levels, warheads. The United Nations Security Council has passed two sanctions resolutions on Iran since December, targeting its nuclear and military sectors and severely impeding its financial transactions with the outside world.
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A senior Iranian prison official has been appointed the warden of Iran’s most notorious prison, Evin. Farjollah Sedaqat took over official duties at Evin Prison in Tehran on Monday, the state-run news agency ILNA reported.Sedaqat was previously the chief of judicial affairs at the Office of Prisons in Tehran Province. His previous titles include warden of Qasr, Qezel-Hesar, and Fardis prisons. Evin Prison was built by the Shah’s regime as a maximum security prison to house political dissidents, after the revolution it became the Islamic Republic’s most dreaded gulag and the site of thousands of political executions. Evin is the same prison where Zahra Kazemi was brutally tortured and raped.
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The head of the teachers union in Iran has been arrested for his role in union protests that have brought schools and universities to a standstill in recent weeks in several Iranian provinces. Ali-Akbar Baghani was arrested by plainclothes security agents at 9.30 am on Monday as he was teaching in Tehran, state-run news agencies reported. The arrest came as a shock to pupils in the class who were in the middle of an exam. The arrest took place without prior coordination with the school principal. There has been a surge in anti-government teachers demonstrations in Iran over the past few weeks, mostly in protest to low salaries. Some sources in Tehran have claimed that up to 1,000 teachers have been arrested in the course of the protests.
