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TEHRAN - Former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has come under fire in Iran for publicly defending the controversial mayor of Tehran.
"How can Mr. Rafsanjani defend a detained suspect at a sacred place such as the Friday congregational prayers?," asked A member of the conservative majority, Ahmad Rasouli-Nejad.
The Persian-language daily newspaper Iran published by the official Islamic Republic News Agency said in a front- page editorial on Monday that Rafsanjani shortened his Friday prayers sermon when some people called for the mayor's execution and remained silent only to avoid tension and protect the unity of the nation.
The conservative daily newspaper Jomhuri Eslami called the hard-liners' disruption "a sinister and inauspicious initiative."
"If these political propaganda games
continue, society will be more divided and dispersed...and this is against
the interests of the revolution," it said.
Tehran Municipality Corruption Trial to Go Ahead, Agence France Presse, April 20
TEHRAN - Iran's chief justice Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi said Monday the corruption trial involving officials of Tehran's municipality would go ahead as planned.
"The affair at the municipality will
be pursued at a public trial in a climate of calm," Yazdi, the conservative
cleric who heads the judiciary, told the official IRNA news agency.
MP Threatens to Blow Whistle on Corruption in Tehran, Agence France Presse, April 20
TEHRAN - An Iranian MP severely criticized former president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani in remarks published Monday for supporting the mayor of Tehran and threatened to release the names of corrupt municipal officials.
Ahmad Rassoulinejad, a conservative MP from a district in northeast Tehran, said Rafsanjani was acting "beneath his dignity" by helping to win the release from prison last week of embattled Tehran mayor Gholam-Hossein Karbaschi.
Rassoulinejad, in remarks published in newspapers here Monday, said that if Rafsanjani persisted he would "release reliable documents as well as the names of all of those who have taken money illegally."
"If Mr. Rafsanjani had allowed an investigation (into corruption in the Tehran administration) from the beginning Mr. Karbaschi may not have been implicated," the MP added.
Rafsanjani, the current head of the
powerful Expediency Council and a top advisor to Iran's supreme leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, named Karbaschi as mayor of Tehran in 1989.
Workers on Strike at Factory, Agence France Presse, April 20
TEHRAN - Workers at a large smelting works in central Iran are on strike in protest at the non-payment of their salaries, the government newspaper Iran reported Monday.
Several workers at the plant in Yazd told the paper that some employees had not been paid for two months. They added that negotiations between the management and strikers have failed to find a solution.
Crisis in Iran's Construction Industry Worsening:
Report, Reuter, April 20
TEHRAN - Housing construction in major Iranian cities was down in the nine months to December, with Tehran seeing the worst slump with a fall of nearly 42 percent, a newspaper on Monday quoted official figures as showing.
Economists have attributed the sharp fall to a general economic slowdown that followed a period of boom in the capital's construction industry.
Hamshahri warned that the fall
in construction would exacerbate Iran's acute housing shortage.
Torture Victims Heal Wounds in Britain, Reuter, April 20
LONDON - In the windowless "nerve center" of London's Medical Foundation lie 13,000 testimonies to torture. They make gruesome reading.
Siros Alavi needed Prozac to regain his strength.
"I lost my entire life. They beat me across the face with a rifle. They whipped my feet with cable. I was alone in a cell for six months, all for being a left-wing activist," Alavi, a 47-year-old Iranian, told Reuters.
"I'm here. But I'm not sure I survived," he said with a thin smile, seated in a quaint garden house at the Foundation's Natural Growth Project.