Iran has arrested 20 people including some foreigners near the border with Iraq and accused them of belonging to a spy network, the state-run news agency reported Monday. The IRNA news agency did not provide the nationalities of the foreigners. Iran last month claimed to have uncovered spy rings organized by the United States and its Western allies. IRNA, quoting the head of the intelligence department in the Kerman Shah province, said the 20 were trained by intelligence services “of the enemy” for economic, military, political, cultural and social purposes. It did not elaborate.
Iranian authorities have charged four Iranian-Americans with endangering national security. Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, was jailed in early May. The other four are Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant with George Soros’ Open Society Institute; Parnaz Azima, a journalist for the U.S.-funded Radio Farda; and Ali Shakeri, a founding board member of the University of California, Irvine, Center for Citizen Peacebuilding.
Iran arrests 20 people accused of being spies – USATODAY.com
And more:
Iranian police and plainclothes security agents broke up a sit-in marking Monday’s anniversary of a bloody raid on a Tehran university dormitory, then stormed the offices of the country’s main pro-democracy student group, student leaders said.
Fifteen students and a mother were beaten and detained, they said. There was no confirmation by the government, which rarely comments on such arrests.
Iran had banned street protests to mark the anniversary of July 9, 1999 raid by police and hard-line vigilantes on a Tehran University dormitory that killed one person and injured at least 20.
Those attacks triggered six days of nationwide protests, the worst since the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the pro-U.S. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and brought hard-line clerics to power.
Pouya Ifaei, a student leader, said the students organized their sit-in at Amir Kabir University Monday to protest the continued detention of eight students been in custody since May on vague charges and to mark the anniversary of the 1999 attack.
“Six students were attacked, beaten up and then detained by police and plainclothes security agents as they staged a sit-in at the main entrance to Amir Kabir University,” Nariman Mostafavi, another student leader, told The Associated Press.
But there are more bad news from Teheran. My friend Aquiles had sent me a tip (in Spanish) but I have managed to found nearly everything in English. You can read it in the following posts:
Jafar Kiani, the man who was sentenced to stoning, along with his partner, Makroumeh Ebrahimi, was stoned. The stoning was arranged for two weeks ago, causing huge disgust in the blogosphere which helped aware the public, something which only paused the verdict, he was stoned on Thursday. There is still no news about Makroumeh, who is still held in prison in Qazvin. One of her lawyers has stated his worries about her, “They are going to carry the verdict on her, too”. The couple have married together thirteen years ago, and have an eleven-year-old child. The judge has not accepted their marriage and has called it adultery. The news is both approved by activists (also, also, also) and by the news sources close to the reformists. Reportedly, the public hesitated from attending the stoning and thus the Police stoned the man. The stoning carried out in Aghche-kand village, in Takistan, Qazvin Province. The Judiciary is still not commenting on the news, but local sources have undoubtedly verified it (source: Roozna).
Jafar Kiani was killed yesterday.Kamangir also reports that a blogger has visited the place where the stoning took place: his blood can still be seen.
The woman’s sentence is still pending.
Just read everything in the links posted before.Another 20 members of different gangs will be also executed on charges of rape, acting against God’s rule, and homosexuality. Asked if the execution will be in public, Jamshidi, the Judiciary’s spokesman, said “that depends on the Judiciary’s decision”. “There are other cases in other cities as well”, he added.