Desperate to cover up Ahmadinejad’s role in hostage taking, Tehran names three dead persons in embassy picture
Khatami’s deputy, advisor confirm Ahmadinejad’s role in embassy takeover
Revelations about the role of the mullahs’ new president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the occupation of the United States embassy and holding U.S. diplomats hostage in 1979 has greatly alarmed and confused the clerical regime, prompting it to make contradictory remarks.
Ninety-six hours after the publication of photos of a hostage-taker, Saeed Hajjarian, among the founders of the mullahs’ Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), resorted to a completely fabricated tale. He told the Associated Press on Saturday that the man in the picture was not Ahmadinejad. “This man is Taqi Mohammadi, a militant who later turned into a dissident and committed suicide in jail. Mohammadi was arrested on charges of involvement in the 1981 bombing in Tehran that killed the country’s president and prime minister,” he said.
A day before, Sharq daily wrote that the man was Jafar Zaker “who was killed during the Iran-Iraq war.” The same paper also wrote that the other person in the picture was named Ranjbaran who “was later executed for his links to an extremist opposition group.”
Hajjarian is the very henchman about whose services to the regime the state-controlled daily had the following to say on April 3, 2000, “In just one night in his neighborhood, he and his fellows killed dozens of members of groups who had taken up arms against the Islamic Republic of Iran in the early 1980s. The next afternoon, they executed the rest of them according to judicial rulings.”
While the main perpetrators of the hostage taking are alive and know all the hostage-takers, after a four-day delay, the clerical regime has presented the names of three dead persons as the one in the embassy picture. This is a threadbare tactic, whereby the mullahs routinely introduce those responsible for their atrocities as persons who were either “killed in the war fronts” or “executed in prison” or “committed suicide in detention” in order to stonewall further investigation or follow up and escape international implications of their crimes.
At the same time, Mohammad Khatami’s deputy and the hostage-takers’ spokeswoman, Massoumeh Ebtekar, and Khatami’s advisor Mohammad-Ali Abtahi emphasized yesterday that Ahmadinejad did not have a principal role in hostage taking and was not among the main perpetrators, confirming that he did take part in the embassy takeover.
Before the sham presidential elections, the National Council of Resistance of Iran issued several statements in which it exposed Ahmadinejad’s role in the hostage taking. In a statement on June 16, the NCRI wrote that he had been among those who planned the embassy takeover.
Six former hostages emphasized that Ahmadinejad repeatedly interrogated them. BBC’s correspondent also said he had interviewed Ahmadinejad as one of the hostage-takers. These leave no doubt about the definitive role of the mullahs’ president in the hostage taking.
Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
July 3, 2005
