TEHRAN - An angry crowd set fire to a police station and government offices in Ramhormoz, southwestern Iran, Thursday, to protest against inadequate public services, the Kayhan newspaper reported.

The violence broke out after several thousand residents of nearby Haftgol rallied at the regional government headquarters in Ramhormoz, the paper said.

Some of the protesters attacked and set fire to the headquarters, along with a police station, a municipal building, and postal and telecommunications offices, the paper said.

Demonstrators also assembled on the site where weekly Friday prayers are held at Haftqol, Kayhan said, adding that no local official bothered to go and talk to them.

The rally was the second this week in Iran. On Monday several thousands people rallied near Shahar-Danqeh, south of Tehran, to protest against "the lack or the mediocre quality of municipal services," press reports and witnesses said.

The demonstrators blocked the road from Tehran south of Saveh and set a municipal kiosk alight before police dispersed them, the reports said.
 

Daily Urges Delay To UK Visit, Reuters, January 6

TEHRAN - A newspaper on Thursday urged Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi to postpone a visit to Britain over an article in a British daily deemed insulting to Iran.

"The foreign minister naturally understands that if he visits London before an official and public apology by the British government, he has acted against the interest of the (Islamic) system and the demands of the nation," the daily Jomhuri-ye Eslami said in a commentary.

In a millennium issue, the London Times reprinted a 1989 obituary that said the rule of Rouhollah Khomeini was "in all significant respects, a disaster," comparing it to the Mongol invasion of 13th century Iran.

The daily Resalat called for a review of bilateral relations and said that "ties with Britain are more disastrous than the Mongol invasion."
 

Mullahs' Rival Factions Reveal Fresh Aspects Of Crimes And Plots Against Iranian Resistance, Iran Zamin News Agency, January 6

In the course of the aggravating power struggle within the ruling clerical establishment, officials and newspapers belonging to rival factions have been unveiling hitherto secret aspects of some of the crimes committed by the Iranian regime against the Mojahedin.

A former Intelligence Ministry operative divulged in an article in the government-sponsored daily, Payam-e Azadi, on January 4 that after the assassination of the Shah's last prime minister, Shahpour Bakhtiar, in Paris in 1991, the Intelligence Ministry wrote a letter to Tehran newspapers, instructing them to "point accusing fingers at the U.S. for this assassination" and argue that the U.S. in this way intended to "sabotage relations between Iran and European countries."

The article listed some of the Iranian writers and authors who were murdered by the Intelligence Ministry between 1993 and 1998 and pointed out that Pirouz Davani, "an independent researcher," disappeared in autumn 1998 because "he revealed some of the actions undertaken by the Ministry of Intelligence against Rajavi's forces in Evin Prison after Operation Mersad". This is a reference to the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in the second half of 1988, most of them members and supporters of the Mojahedin.

The article cites "a totally reliable diplomatic source in Iran" as saying that after the assassination of several dissidents in Mykonos restaurant in Berlin, "in the first half of the 1990s, the Intelligence Ministry smuggled several medium- and long-range missiles to Germany on the basis of its analysis that in response the Americans were going to launch a direct attack on Iran... The objective was to strike at American interests with missiles launched from Europe, in case of U.S. attack on Iran."

An Isfahan-based weekly, Ava, wrote on January 4 that the Intelligence Ministry had been carrying out acts of sabotage and political killings in Iran in recent years in order to pretend that "Massoud Rajavi's forces were after creating a religious war in Iran."

The weekly wrote: "Among such acts one can mention the murder of a Sunni religious leader in Kermanshah, the killings of two priests in Tehran and Isfahan, the bombing of the holy shrine of Imam Reza, the bombing of the Makki mosque in Zahedan and the abortive bombing of the holy shrine of Massoumeh in Qom… But after the disclosure of murders carried out by a gang in the Intelligence Ministry, the truth became exposed: for one decade, the public was being deliberately misinformed. The weekly then described some of the stage-managing of the mullahs' regime in 1994 designed to blame these crimes on the Mojahedin.
 

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