Back to Brief on Iran
TEHRAN - Iran launched into damage control Monday after the son of a top Iranian dignitary who fled to the United States and criticized the Islamic regime in a radio broadcast last week.
The Tehran press insisted the defection of Ahmad Rezai, son of the former commander-in-chief of the elite Revolutionary Guards, General Mohsen Rezai, was an entirely personal matter.
"The case of Ahmad should be viewed as the case of an individual, isolated and personal. It should not be politicized in any way," said an editorial in the English-language Tehran Times.
The paper criticized the official news agency IRNA for carrying an implausible claim by Ali Rezai that his brother had been kidnapped by Washington and brainwashed into making the broadcast on Voice of America.
The Tehran press also sought to distance General Mohsen Rezai, now a member of the Expediency Council, Iran's highest body for political arbitration, from the actions of his son.
"His family is in no way responsible for the act of their deviated son, Ahmad," the paper insisted.
"Ahmad is not the first person to do so. There are other sons of stalwart revolutionaries who had chosen a wrong path. The deviated sons were punished but their family members remained at the service of the revolution," it said.
Argentina Close to Requesting Arrest of Iranian Diplomat, Agence France Presse, July 5
BUENOS AIRES - Argentina is preparing to seek the arrest of an Iranian diplomat suspected of participating in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center here, the daily newspaper Clarin said Sunday.
The paper reported that the federal judge in charge of the investigation, Juan Jose Galeano, will ask that Moshen Rabbani be detained after July 18, the fourth anniversary of the explosion at the center that killed 86 and injured more than one hundred.
Prosecutors here allege that Tehran helped plan the bombing of the Jewish center bombing and a 1992 blast at the Israeli embassy here that killed 29.
Argentine newspapers have said Rabbani, Iran's cultural attache, was the leader of the At-Tahuid mosque in Buenos Aires, which investigators believe was a meeting place for persons who may have been involved in the attack on the community center and on the Israeli embassy in 1992.
"They Don't Want The Youths to Think", The Christian Science Monitor, July 2
TEHRAN - For centuries, royalty and those less-than-royalty in Persia indulged in the traditional pastime of smoking opium.
The 1979 Islamic revolution forced such activity underground, but today its use - in the much harder, modern form of heroin - is making a comeback in Iran.
"Do you know what they are doing over there?" asks Rami, a former user, pointing his thumb at the crowd of 200 or so men dealing quietly among themselves... "They're selling 'H.' " Many of the men look poor, almost all are dressed in black and wearing beards, and there are some soldiers and police - even a woman or two, and a child - among them…
Though the ruling clerics of the Islamic Republic have spent hundreds of millions combating the spread of drugs, making it one of their top priorities, security officers here appear not to intervene - even as pushers sell their illegal goods openly on a warm afternoon.
This leads Rami to his own conclusion: "I think the government wants this to happen," he asserts. "They don't want the youths to think."
Football And Diplomacy Have "Nothing" in Common, Agence France Presse, July 3
TEHRAN - The head of Iran's judiciary, Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, said Friday that World Cup football and diplomacy "have nothing to do with one another."
"Football has nothing to do with international political questions. Those who say the contrary do not understand or pretend not to understand," Yazdi said during weekly prayers at the University of Tehran.
Rafsanjani's Demagoguery, Reuter, July 6
Iran's former President Hashemi Rafsanjani told Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah he was concerned about weak oil prices and called for bilateral cooperation to lift them, the Iranian news agency IRNA said.
IRNA said Rafsanjani held a telephone conversation with the crown prince on Saturday night and "expressed concern about the slump in oil prices and called for further cooperation between Tehran and Riyadh to push up the oil prices."
[Reuters also reported that: World oil prices dropped several cents on Monday after Luis Giusti, president of Venezuelan state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela, said Iran was producing 230,000 bpd above the level agreed by fellow OPEC members following an emergency meeting of Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Mexico in Riyadh in March.]