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DUBAI - Iran's main exiled opposition group called on Sunday for an international fact-finding mission to go to Iran to investigate a string of mystery deaths of dissidents and writers.
A statement by the National Council of Resistance said its President Massoud Rajavi "urged international human rights organizations and bodies to condemn these heinous murders and called for the dispatch to Iran of an international fact-finding team to investigate these murders."
"He (Rajavi) said it is imperative that the United Nations Security Council address these murders," the statement said.
The body of a third Iranian secularist intellectual, Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh, was found at the weekend. Family members told Reuters they had identified the body saying it showed signs he had been strangled.
Pouyandeh, a writer and translator, had been last seen alive leaving his office on December 9.
That same day the body of dissident poet Mohammad Mokhtari was discovered, and local press reports quoted a relative as saying he, too, had been strangled.
Dissident Javad Sharif was found dead last week in what friends say were suspicious circumstances. A fourth intellectual, Pirouz Davani, is missing and feared dead.
Veteran opposition leader Dariush Forouhar and his wife were found stabbed to death at their home in Tehran in November.
Khatami's Foreign Minister Slams Palestinian Charter Change, Reuter, December 13
TEHRAN - Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi has condemned the cancellation of anti-Israel clauses in the PLO charter, saying it was a humiliation for the Palestinian people, newspapers reported on Sunday.
"The recent move...to change the national charter is an act of meanness aimed at humiliating the Palestinian people," the daily Jomhuri Eslami quoted Kharrazi as saying.
Former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani on Friday attacked the cancellation saying Palestinians were "submissively" giving in to U.S. pressure.
In a step towards fulfilling the latest U.S.-brokered peace deal with Israel, a top Palestine Liberation Organization council on Thursday reaffirmed the cancellation of clauses in the PLO charter calling for Israel's destruction.
Iran says Israel has no right to exist and condemns the Middle East peace process as a sell-out of Palestinian and Islamic rights.
The Islamic republic has close ties with radical Moslem groups opposed to the peace deals.
Iran Says US Can't Curb Its Missile Capacity, Reuter, December 11
TEHRAN - Former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said on Friday the United States was no longer able to curb Iran's missile industry because Tehran had largely reached technological self-sufficiency.
"Missile production has truly become a local technology in Iran...Despite their (U.S.) efforts, it is out of their hands now, thank God, because we have reached the level we needed to get to," Rafsanjani said at a weekly prayer gathering.
"Iran is today a proper missile producer which does not need any country, not China, not Russia and not others," the Iranian leader said in remarks carried by Tehran radio.
Iran said its navy on Thursday tested Iranian-made ballistic and cruise missiles at the end of war games in the Gulf. In July, Iran tested the medium-range Shehab-3 missile, which it said had a range of 1,300 km (800 miles).
Azerbaijan Accuses Iran of Caspian Encroachment, Reuter, December 10
BAKU - Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry on Thursday accused Iran of encroaching on what Baku considers its sector of the Caspian Sea by preparing to sign an oil exploration deal with two foreign firms.
"Azerbaijan considers inadmissible an agreement between Iran and the oil companies Shell and LASMO on conducting a geological and geographical exploration in a section of the Caspian Sea encompassing a part of the Azeri sector of the Caspian," said the statement.
"Unilateral and illegal actions by the Iranian side undermine the positive tendencies which have been observed in the process of work on the legal status of the Caspian Sea and could assert a negative influence on the strengthening of the spirit of cooperation and trust in the Caspian region," it said.
Strictly secular Azerbaijan has uneasy ties with the Islamic Republic, which it has accused in the past of trying to destabilize it and its pro-Western orientation.
Tehran has chided Baku for its warm ties with Israel and the United States.