Iran withdrew its ambassadors from both Kenya and Tanzania less than two weeks before terrorist bombs devastated the U.S. embassies in the two East African nations, a prominent Iranian opposition group said yesterday.

The Iranian ambassador in Tanzania had served in Argentina, where he came under suspicion of having been involved in the deadly bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994.

The charges were leveled at a Washington news conference by the National Council of Resistance of Iran….

Iranian resistance spokeswoman Soona Samsami identified the ambassador to Tanzania as Ali Saghaian and the envoy to Kenya as Kazem Tabatabai. Both were recalled within the past two weeks along with their respective cultural attaches, she said.

Mrs. Samsami said no other Iranian diplomats were called home from foreign posts at that time and no explanation for the moves was given….

… U.S. intelligence sources said that investigators had already come to the conclusion that the bombings required major levels of organization and months of sophisticated planning.

A senior European intelligence source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the attack had to have been organized by a government because of the sophisticated nature of the explosives and the precision of the timing of the blasts. "It has got to be government organized," he said.

Patrick Clawson, a terrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Iran had built up huge embassy staffs in both Kenya and Tanzania as part of a major drive for influence in East Africa.

"The Iranians certainly have the capabilities in the region to prepare substantial amounts of support for a terrorist infrastructure there, were they so minded to do so," he said….

Mr. Saghaian, the Iranian ambassador in Tanzania, was the subject of an Argentine government probe in 1996 following published charges that he was reorganizing Iranian-backed terror cells in that country.

Argentine authorities this week announced that an FBI report accused Iran of organizing and financing the 1994 Jewish community center bombing, which killed 86 persons. No one was ever charged with the bombing….

Mr. Saghaian's right-hand man in Iran's Tanzanian embassy, cultural attaché Mohammed-Javad Tashkiri, was recalled at the same time and has also faced allegations of being involved with Iranian terrorist activities, Mrs. Samsami said.

In a previous post as Iran's cultural attaché in Jordan, Mr. Tashkiri "was declared persona non grata and expelled by the Jordanian government due to his fundamentalist and terrorist activities," Mrs. Samsami said….

East African Bombings "Only Natural," Editorial, Government-controlled Jomhouri-Islami Daily, August 12

The bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania are an important development …The key point is that they demonstrated the existence of an intense hatred of America in the hearts of the nations of the world.

This hatred is so deep that despite taking the lives of many innocent people, the bombings prompted no negative reaction whatsoever, only because they struck a blow against American prestige.

… It seems that there is again need for reflection on the destructive international role of the United States; everyone should search for ways to institutionalize opposition to America, for whom titles such as "the century's mother of corruption," and "the great Satan" are still fitting….

The goal of those who control the world's vast information networks is to cover the repulsive faces of world-devourers and their crimes. When expression of the bitter truth is prevented by force, it is only natural that it express itself in the form of such violent incidents as those in Dar as-Salaam and Nairobi….

More Than 1000 People A Month Die on Iran's Roads, Agence France Presse, August 12

An average of 1,100 people are killed and 6,000 injured in accidents on Iran's roads each month, the head of Iran's association of forensic pathologists said Wednesday.

Traffic accidents claim 200 dead and 1,200 injured each month in the capital alone, Jafar Tofiqi told the official news agency IRNA.

Iran has one of the highest road traffic accident rates in the world with more than 200,000 accidents a year for just over three million vehicles on the roads.

Scarcely a single day passes without a fatal road accident somewhere in the country.

The high accident rate is mainly the result of the dilapidated state of many of the vehicles on the roads, the growing number of heavy goods vehicles, poor driving and the lack of police checks.
 
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