NEWS)))))
Iranian authorities have hanged 15 people in the north-eastern city of Mashad, state-run media reported on Monday. The men were hanged over the past week, the hard-line daily Qods wrote. Gholam-Hossein Esmaeili, Mashad’s Chief Prosecutor, said that the judiciary was acting “decisively” against those creating instability. He added that the 15 individuals had been hanged for drug trafficking.Iranian authorities routinely execute dissidents on bogus charges such as armed robbery and drug smuggling.Mashad was the scene of a major anti-government protest last week, with local residents attacking agents of Iran’s State Security Forces (SSF) who were attempting to detain a woman for “mal-veiling”. During the clashes, the SSF fired teargas and attacked angry protestors with batons. A nationwide clampdown mainly targeting women for “mal-veiling” began in mid-April.
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Authorities have chopped off the hand of a man in public in the western city of Kermanshah, a state-run daily reported on Tuesday. “In order to deal decisively against those disrupting national security and order and to carry out the divine law, at exactly 4 pm on Sunday the sentence for Arash’s hand to be amputated in public was carried out in Kermanshah’s Jafaar-Abad Square”, wrote the hard-line daily Qods. The report said that Arash, whose hand was chopped off, had taken part in 16 robberies. The sentence had been upheld by Iran’s State Supreme Court, it added. It did not mention, however, which hand was amputated.
Iran’s Islamic penal system regularly practices centuries-old sentences for petty crimes, such as amputation of limbs, eye gouging, stoning to death, and throwing prisoners off a cliff in a sac.
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On Monday May 14th an official at Tehran’s governorate applauded the current nationwide crackdown on women who violate Iran’s strict Islamic dress code but said the initiative did not go far enough. “The actions of State Security Forces (SSF) against mal-veiled women are necessary but insufficient”, said Farahnaz Qandforoush, the governorates advisor on women’s affairs. The SSF should have decisively enforced the dress code over the past decade, Qandforoush told the government-run news agency Fars. She added: “The inaction in previous years has led women and girls to start thinking that they can appear in society in any way they want”.The nationwide clampdown on “poorly-dressed” women began in mid-April.
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Associated Press reported on Wed that Iran persists in its brazen defiance of U.N. Security Council demands that it halt uranium enrichment, the chief U.S. nuclear envoy warned Tuesday ahead of a fresh assessment that could lead to tougher sanctions against Tehran. Gregory L. Schulte said Washington "would welcome a report verifying that Iran has suspended its enrichment-related activities" when the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, delivers its latest update by early next week. "Unfortunately, I don't foresee such a report," Schulte said in a speech at the University of Vienna, calling Iran "a blatant case of noncompliance" with the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Agency inspectors who visited Iran's main nuclear facility at Natanz on short notice Sunday found evidence to suggest that it may have overcome technological challenges and has started enriching uranium on a significantly wider scale, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
