Back to Brief on Iran
TEHRAN - Iranian conservatives stepped up attacks against Mohammad Khatami's allies on Friday, vowing to protect supreme clerical rule.
"We will give assurances to the great leader that we will not allow this regime to become un-Islamic," Tehran Friday prayer leader Ayatollah Hassan Taheri-Khorramabadi said in a sermon.
"We will not allow the Islamic character of this regime to be shaken and diluted."
"Vulgar Western culture is being propagated...The enemy seeks to shake young people's belief in Islam and in the (1979) revolution. These have deeply worried the leader and we have to be alert not to allow such things to happen," Taheri-Khorramabadi said.
"We will not allow poisonous ideas
to find their way into our universities and disturb the calm atmosphere,"
said Abdollah Jasbi, the head of Iran's private Open Universities.
Public Executions Continue in Iran, Iran Zamin News Agency, May 24
Officials of the mullahs' anti-human regime hanged three young men, Namdar, Faraj and Mojtaba, in Tehran's Qasr prison on Tuesday, May 18.
Two Iranian Kurdish dissidents, Ibrahim Sharifi and Javad Reza'i, captured in clashes with the Revolutionary Guards in June 1992, were executed in Saqqez prison.
These bring to 395, the number of people
executed since Khatami took office.
Antigovernment Demonstration in Tehran, Iran Zamin News Agency, May 24
Subsequent to clashes among the clerical regime's rival factions in Tehran's Laleh Park, yesterday several thousand teenagers and students marched around Tehran University.
Large groups of passers-by joined the students who were chanting such slogans as "death to dictatorship" and "freedom, freedom," demanding the overthrow of the clerical regime.
The regime's suppressive forces, including the Revolutionary Guards, State Security Force and special anti-riot forces, attacked the crowd with batons, knuckle-dusters and chains.
More than 100 people were arrested
and taken to an unknown location.
With "Moderates" Like This…, Agence France Presse, May 24
TEHRAN - A "moderate" Iranian MP has been sentenced to six months in jail for using a gun to threaten a conservative member of the supervisory boards which oversaw February's local elections, newspapers reported Monday.
Mojtaba Musavi Ojaq, a "moderate" MP from Kermanshah in western Iran, was found guilty of threatening the unnamed conservative board member during a public meeting in April.
Ojaq has repeatedly been accused of
making armed threats during heated discussions over the municipal elections
with conservative members of the supervisory board.
Army Intelligence Colonel Dies in Helicopter Crash, Reuters, May 23
TEHRAN - An Iranian army intelligence colonel and another officer died when their helicopter crashed in southern Iran, a newspaper reported on Sunday.
Habibollah Namazian, head of intelligence at a training camp for airborne units in Isfahan in central Iran, died on Saturday when his helicopter crashed near the southern city of Shiraz, the newspaper Kayhan said.
Another officer died in the crash,
the paper said. The cause of the incident was being investigated, it added.
Huge Fire Destroys Warehouse of Logistics Command, Iran Zamin News Agency, May 21
A large warehouse belonging to the army's logistics command in Abbas-Abad garrison in Abbas-Abad (Beheshti) street in Tehran caught fire on Monday, May 17, Mojahedin's Command HQ inside Iran reported.
The huge fire at the 2,000 Sq. meters-warehouse began at 11:00 a.m. and raged for five hours, destroying everything, including spare parts and machinery worth millions of dollars.
The clerical regime has arrested and interrogated a number of soldiers suspected of involvement in the fire.
In recent months, as the country's economic and social situation has deteriorated, discontent within the regular army has been on the rise.
The punishment of criminal Maj. Gen. Ali Sayyad Shirazi by Mojahedin's military units in Tehran on April 11, has dramatically boosted the mood of defiance among the soldiers and young officers.