February 21, 2011

TEHRAN, February 20, 2011 (AFP) – Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Sunday called on Muslims to “remove” the United States from the Islamic world.

“The main problem in the Muslim world is the presence of the United States. It is the biggest problem. We need to address that,” he told a gathering of Shiite and Sunni scholars in Tehran for an international conference on Islam.

“It is necessary to remove the United States from the Islamic world,” the all-powerful cleric and Islamic republic’s commander-in-chief said, adding that the country’s arch-foe was currently weak.

Khamenei urged Muslims worldwide to preserve the “people’s movement in Egypt,” saying it was the duty of both the people and dignitaries of Arab nations and the entire Islamic community.

He reiterated that the Arab revolts were “Islamic” and must be consolidated.

“The enemies try to say that the popular movements in Egypt, Tunisia and other nations are un-Islamic, but certainly these popular movements are Islamic and must be consolidated,” he said.

Khamenei also urged that “the conspiracy of enemies to create differences between Sunnis and Shiites” be confronted.

On February 4, in his Friday prayer sermon, Khamenei called for an Islamic regime to be installed in Egypt, a week before that country’s strongman Hosni Mubarak was ousted.

Iranian officials expressed support for the uprising in the Arab world’s most populous nation.

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February 21, 2011

TEHRAN (AFP) – A massive police deployment in Tehran prevented large-scale protests from erupting although Iranian opposition websites reported stray clashes and officials said the capital remained calm.

Fars news agency, meanwhile, said Faezeh Hashemi, daughter of former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, was briefly arrested after “leading anti-revolutionaries and rioters” in Tehran.

Witnesses said a heavy deployment of riot police and Basij militiamen in key Tehran squares including Haft-e Tir ensured that anti-government demonstrators were unable to stage significant protests.

Tehran was the epicentre of deadly anti-government protests in 2009 after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election, and also saw clashes on Monday during a demonstration in which two people were killed.

On Sunday, supporters of opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi had called for fresh demonstrations and tried to stage them, their websites said. The two men refuse to acknowledge Ahmadinejad’s presidency.

Police maintained that Tehran had stayed calm.

“The situation in Tehran is normal and police have been deployed in Tehran… There were no special problems security-wise,” said Ahmad Reza Radan, Iran’s deputy police chief, quoted by ISNA news agency.

In a separate report on Fars he was quoted as blaming the United States and Britain for “sporadic gatherings of monafeghins (hypocrites),” a term officials use to refer to members of the outlawed People’s Mujahedeen of Iran.

Radan also said that police discovered a package of explosives with an electronic detonator and a small firearm with a silencer near a Tehran university.

Tehran traffic police chief Hossein Rahimi told state news agency IRNA that traffic was “heavy… but flowing” in the city.

Several opposition websites and witnesses reported scattered demonstrations in Tehran and some clashes between police and protesters.

“Police fired tear gas as a cat-and-mouse game (between police and demonstrators) began in Vali Asr Square” of Tehran, said the website Rahesabz.net, citing witnesses.

Crowds of demonstrators were also seen in other Tehran squares and some streets, shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is Greatest), according to Karroubi’s Sahamnews.org website.

Fars reported Rafsanjani’s daughter was detained in the capital but later released.

“Faezeh Hashemi, who was arrested as she led a number of anti-revolutionaries and rioters while claiming to purchase clothes in Vali Asr Street, has been released,” the report said.

Earlier, IRNA reported she was “identified and arrested by police in Vali Asr street while intending to make harsh comments and chant provocative slogans and create a disturbance.”

Rafsanjani himself has come under harsh criticism from conservatives who demand that he publicly condemn opposition leaders. The cleric and former two-time president reportedly supported Mousavi in the 2009 election.

Witnesses and opposition website Kaleme.com said men on motorbikes were riding around parts of Tehran “in a show of strength… to intimidate people and prevent them from holding large gatherings.”

According to Rahesabz.net, mobile phone networks in central Tehran were cut and Internet speed was “noticeably slow.”

Sahamnews.org said anti-government gatherings were staged in the central city of Isfahan and Shiraz, southern Iran, while Fars said the situation was calm in Iran’s second largest city, Mashhad in the northeast.

Foreign media have been banned from covering any opposition gatherings.

Sunday’s gatherings took place after a call on Thursday by the Council for Coordination of Green Movement Hope — a group owing allegiance to opposition leaders — to commemorate the killings of two people in Tehran last week.

Those protests, which saw demonstrators clash with security forces, were the first since February 2010 when the authorities marked the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution.

Nine security personnel were injured in Monday’s clashes, officials and websites said.

Anti-government protests erupted in Iran after a June 2009 presidential poll in which Mousavi and Karroubi, both candidates, charged that the incumbent, hardliner Ahmadinejad, was re-elected through massive fraud.

February 21, 2011

Glendora, California (CNN) — It’s the kind of Southern California town made for daydreaming: Quiet streets and sunny skies, a place where tranquility seems rarely to be disturbed.

But according to police, as well as classified U.S. diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, the Los Angeles suburb of Glendora was the scene of an international assassination plot. The scheme involved would-be killers hiding out in a low-budget motel and an elaborate plan that, at first, involved shooting the victim, but later centered on running him over with a van, police documents disclose.

“I’ve been a police officer here for more than 20 years, and I’ve never investigated anything like this,” said Glendora police Lt. Tim Staab.

It all unraveled on a late summer day in 2009, when a would-be hit man hired by an Iranian national named Reza Sadeghnia got cold feet and called police from a local gas station.

“This person went on to tell us that for the past four days, they together had been scheming how to assassinate, how to kill another Glendora resident,” Staab said.

Police said the target in Glendora was Jamshid Sharmahd, an Iranian-American dissident who is the radio voice of a small group called Tondar, devoted to the overthrow of the Iranian government. The Iranian government calls Tondar a terrorist group, but the U.S. State Department says it is only a propaganda outlet.

According to police reports, the informant offered proof: the purchase of a cheap van from a used-car dealer that would be used to run down and kill the target. He told detectives he had been paid $5,000 to kill Sharmahd, with another $27,000 delivered to his mother back in Iran.

The plotters decided to use a van after deciding that buying a gun would be too risky, the reports state.

The informant told police that Sadeghnia, the mastermind, had fled Glendora and was about to leave Los Angeles on a plane. Staab said Glendora detectives found him in an airport hotel under his own name and arrested him in his room.

Along with his laptop computer, police seized $2,100 in cash.

“They were crisp $100 bills. There was a stack of them. And around it was a bank wrapping, and they were all written in Farsi,” he said.

According to those leaked American diplomatic cables, this wasn’t the first time Sadeghnia had been implicated in an assassination attempt.

A prominent Iranian dissident in London, Ali Reza Nourizadeh, “had been targeted by Iranian intelligence,” according to one cable. Nourizadeh is a prominent Voice of America commentator based in London, and Sadeghnia had contacted him several months before his California arrest, claiming to be a “big fan,” the January 2010 account states.

But Nourizadeh became suspicious of Sadeghnia after he took large numbers of pictures — photos that later turned up in the office of a deputy intelligence minister in Tehran, the cable states. He stopped taking Sadeghnia’s calls “and heard nothing more about the matter until he was visited by UK anti-terror police January 14,” according to the cable.

According to the cable, Sadeghnia had tracked the London dissident at the same time he was making plans to assassinate the California dissident. The arrest by Glendora police brought a halt to both plans.

“Nourizadeh is a well-known figure both inside and outside Iran, and is an outspoken critic of the Iranian regime, so it is unsurprising that the regime would want to keep a close eye on him,” the document states. “If, however, the regime has targeted Nourizadeh for assassination, as it appears to have done with Sharmahd, it marks a clear escalation in the regime’s attempts to intimidate critics outside its borders, and could have a chilling effect on journalists, academics and others in the West who until recently felt little physical threat from the regime.”

Sharmahd said there was “no doubt” that the plot against him involved the Iranian government. He said the motive was not only to kill him, but also to replace both Tondar’s website and its radio broadcasts with fakes in an attempt to hijack the movement.

Sadeghnia ultimately pleaded guilty to a charge of solicitation of murder and was jailed for eight months. But the story doesn’t end there.

After he was released from prison in 2010, Sadeghnia applied for permission to leave the United States while he was on five years’ probation and visit Iran for one month “to visit his dying father,” according to probation reports. His first application was denied, but a second request was granted a few weeks later on the condition that he return no later than October 27.

He has not been seen in the United States since. Probation officials would not comment on the decision.

Meanwhile, another Iranian-American — a 71-year-old California businessman named Reza Taghavi — was being held in an Iranian prison. He had been jailed for more than two years after Iranian authorities said he had given $200 to an Iranian dissident group: Tondar, the same group based in Glendora.

Taghavi denied any association with Tondar. The money, he said, was to be given to a friend of a friend.

Within weeks of Sadeghnia’s arrival in Iran, Taghavi walked out of Evin Prison.

Taghavi said he believes there was “no connection” between his release and Sadeghnia’s arrival. His attorney, a former Bush administration ambassador, Pierre Prosper, said he doesn’t think there’s a link, either.

“But it’s an interesting coincidence, isn’t it?” Prosper said in a telephone interview.

The State Department told CNN that there was no link between Sadeghnia’s return to Iran and Taghavi’s release. But back in Glendora, Sharmahd said there’s no doubt in his mind that there was a swap in which the United States traded the man who orchestrated his attempted murder to Iran in exchange for the jailed businessman.

“You give my man back. I give you your man back,” he said.

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