Photo claimed to show Iran President with hostage

A photo has emerged which it is claimed links the President-elect of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with the taking of 60 American hostages during the US embassy siege in Tehran in 1979.

A London-based Iranian news agency which opposes Mr Ahmadinejad is circulating the photograph, which it says was taken by the Associated Press news agency on the first day of the hostage crisis.

In the picture, a man which the Iran Focus agency claims it has identified as Mr Ahmadinejad, is seen holding the arm of a blindfolded US hostage.

The possible role of Mr Ahmadinejad in the embassy takeover, which lasted 444 days and remains a significant sore between America and Iran, came to light in the run-up to the presidential elections on June 17.

Mr Ahmadinejad is known to have been member of the "Office for Strengthening of Unity Between Universities and Theological Seminaries" or the OSU, the main student group behind the takeover, but his precise role in the hostage-taking was unclear.

Yesterday, in an article on the BBC website, the broadcaster John Simpson appeared to pour fuel on the controversy when he said he recalled meeting Mr Ahmadinejad after the hostage crisis and remembered seeing him in the grounds of the embassy.

"When I read a profile of him in the English-language Tehran Times, I realised where I must have seen him: in the former American embassy in Tehran," writes Mr Simpson.

"Ahmadinejad was a founder of the group of young activists who swarmed over the embassy wall and held the diplomats and embassy workers hostage for 444 days."

And today, Mo Jazayeri, the executive editor of Iran Focus, the agency distributing the picture, was adamant that it showed Mr Ahmadinejad. He said: "We strongly believe it was 4 Nov 1979, the first day of the hosting taking in Tehran. The AP took these photos. There is also apparently footage which shows Ahmadinejad and several other hostage takers taking this hostage out of the compound and bringing him in front of the crowd which chants ‘Death to America.’ It was a very horrific scene which was shown on television outside Iran worldwide."

According to Michael Theodoulou, who covers Middle East affairs for The Times, the photograph, if genuine, could have a damaging effect on Mr Ahmadinejad's relationship with America, which is already expected to be fractious.

"These images will really anger the Americans," he told Times Online. "Britain is never really aware of the impact the hostage crisis had on the American pysche. No other foreign crisis had the same effect. It really formed the image of Iran in America and is a real source of the continuing hostility between the two countries."

But the claims have been strongly denied by Mr Ahmadinejad's office, which says that the man in the image is not him. Other hostage-takers who were present at the embassy siege also say that the President-elect was not involved in the storming of the embassy.

Ramita Navai, correspondent for The Times in Tehran, spoke to Abbas Abdi, one of the leading hostage takers, who has recently been released from prison, this morning. She said: "I spoke to Abbas Abdi today and he said that Ahmadinejad didn't storm the embassy. And he also said: 'Look, a lot of people came in and out of the embassy during the crisis. It went on for more than a year'."

Ms Navai said that so many of the students involved in the hostage crisis went on to become politicians that there is no reason why Mr Ahmadinejad would disguise his role in the siege.

The claim of Mr Ahmadinejad's identity in the photograph was made on the day that the president-elect gave an impassioned speech calling for a new Islamic revolution.

During his first press conference as President-elect last week, Mr Ahmadinejad struck a moderate note. But today, at a memorial service for families killed in a 1981 attack on the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, he said he hoped his election victory would spark a new global Islamic revolution.

"Thanks to the blood of the martyrs, a new Islamic revolution has arisen and the Islamic revolution of 1384 (the current Iranian year) will, if God wills, cut off the roots of injustice in the world," the official IRNA agency quoted Mr Ahmadinejad as saying.

"The era of oppression, hegemonic regimes, tyranny and injustice has reached its end. The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world. In one night, the martyrs strode down a path of 100 years."

Mr Ahmadinejad's rhetoric will not be welcomed in the US or the EU. Last night, Javier Solana, the head of foreign policy for the EU, said that he will wait and see before judging the new government of Iran but insisted that the EU's stance on Iran was clear:

"I repeat the importance the European Union attaches to political and economic reforms in Iran as well as progress on issues of concern: human rights, non-proliferation, counter-terrorism and the Middle East. Such progress is necessary for EU-Iran relations - including the negotiations for a trade and co-operation agreement - to reach their full potential."

"Nothing outside these terms will be accepted. We need to wait and see how the new leadership will react to these ideas which they know very well are those of the EU," he said.

From Gunny Bob Newman at KOA:

NEW IRANIAN PRESIDENT IS CARD-CARRYING TERRORIST

Helped Seize US Hostages In 1979

Gunny's Note: My sources tell me this clown has been involved in Iran's creation, training, equipping and deploying of Hezbollah from the very beginning. He is complicit in the murders of hundreds of Americans. Now we know there are at least 10 Hezbollah cells in the United States at this very moment.

Given these facts, the US should immediately kill him.

Twice.

Painfully.

“Ahmadinejad? Who’s he?”

This was the typical reaction of most Iranians a day after the first round of presidential elections in Iran, when they heard that the two candidates facing each other in the run-off were veteran politician Ayatollah Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and the little-known, ultra-conservative mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Last week’s surprise was all forgotten by the much bigger shock on Friday, when Ahmadinejad defeated the former President and iconic figure in the ruling theocracy in a landslide victory that consolidated power in the hands of the ruling Islamic clerics.

With spotlights now trained on the small, bearded figure in a trademark dilapidated grey suit, Ahmadinejad’s murky past is causing deep anxiety in Iran and growing concern abroad over the new President’s policies and orientation.

Born in the desert town of Garmsar, east of Tehran, in 1956, Ahmadinejad was the fourth child of a working class family with seven children. His father, who was a blacksmith, moved the family to Tehran when Ahmadinejad was barely a year old. He was brought up in the rough neighbourhoods of south Tehran, where a cocktail of poverty, frustration and xenophobia in the heydays of the Shah’s elitist regime provided fertile grounds for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

After finishing high school, Ahmadinejad went to Elm-o Sanaat University in 1975 to study engineering. Soon the whirlwind of Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini swept him from the classroom to the mosque and he joined a generation of firebrand Islamic fundamentalists dedicated to the cause of an Islamic world revolution.

Student activists in Elm-o Sanaat University at the time of the Iranian revolution were dominated by ultra-conservative Islamic fundamentalists. Ahmadinejad soon became one of their leaders and founded the Islamic Students Association in that university after the fall of the Shah’s regime.

In 1979, he became the representative of Elm-o Sanaat students in the Office for Strengthening of Unity Between Universities and Theological Seminaries, which later became known as the OSU. The OSU was set up by Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, who was at the time Khomeini’s top confidant and a key figure in the clerical leadership. Beheshti wanted the OSU to organise Islamist students to counter the rapidly rising influence of the opposition Mojahedin-e Khalq (MeK) among university students.

The OSU played a central role in the seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran in November 1979. Members of the OSU central council, who included Ahmadinejad as well as Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, Mohsen (Mahmoud) Mirdamadi, Mohsen Kadivar, Mohsen Aghajari, and Abbas Abdi, were regularly received by Khomeini himself.

According to other OSU officials, when the idea of storming the U.S. embassy in Tehran was raised in the OSU central committee by Mirdamadi and Abdi, Ahmadinejad suggested storming the Soviet embassy at the same time. A decade later, most OSU leaders re-grouped around Khatami but Ahmadinejad remained loyal to the ultra-conservatives.

During the crackdown on universities in 1980, which Khomeini called the “Islamic Cultural Revolution”, Ahmadinejad and the OSU played a critical role in purging dissident lecturers and students many of whom were arrested and later executed. Universities remained closed for three years and Ahmadinejad joined the Revolutionary Guards.

In the early 1980s, Ahmadinejad worked in the “Internal Security” department of the IRGC and earned notoriety as a ruthless interrogator and torturer. According to the state-run website Baztab, allies of outgoing President Mohammad Khatami have revealed that Ahmadinejad worked for some time as an executioner in the notorious Evin Prison, where thousands of political prisoners were executed in the bloody purges of the 1980s.

In 1986, Ahmadinejad became a senior officer in the Special Brigade of the Revolutionary Guards and was stationed in Ramazan Garrison near Kermanshah in western Iran. Ramazan Garrison was the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards’ “extra-territorial operations”, a euphemism for terrorist attacks beyond Iran’s borders.

In Kermanshah, Ahmadinejad became involved in the clerical regime’s terrorist operations abroad and led many “extra-territorial operations of the IRGC”. With the formation of the elite Qods (Jerusalem) Force of the IRGC, Ahmadinejad became one of its senior commanders. He was the mastermind of a series of assassinations in the Middle East and Europe, including the assassination of Iranian Kurdish leader Abdorrahman Qassemlou, who was shot dead by senior officers of the Revolutionary Guards in a Vienna flat in July 1989. Ahmadinejad was a key planner of the attack, according to sources in the Revolutionary Guards.

Ahmadinejad served for four years as the governor of the towns of Maku and Khoy in northwestern Iran. In 1993, he was appointed by Minister of Islamic Culture and Guidance Ali Larijani, a fellow officer of the Revolutionary Guards, as his cultural adviser. Months later, he was appointed as the governor of the newly-created Ardebil Province.

In 1997, the newly-installed Khatami administration removed Ahmadinejad from his post and he returned to Elm-o Sanaat University to teach, but his principal activity was to organize Ansar-e Hezbollah, a radical gang of violent Islamic vigilantes.

Since becoming mayor of Tehran in April 2003, Ahmadinejad has been using his position to build up a strong network of radical Islamic fundamentalists organised as “Abadgaran-e Iran-e Islami” (literally, Developers of an Islamic Iran). Working in close conjunction with the Revolutionary Guard’s, Abadgaran was able to win the municipal elections in 2003 and the parliamentary election in 2004. They owed their victories as much to low turnouts and general disillusionment with the “moderate” faction of the regime as to their well-oiled political and military machinery.

Abadgaran bills itself as a group of young neo-Islamic fundamentalists who want to revive the ideals and policies of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini. It was one of several ultra-conservative groups that were setup on the orders of Ayatollah Khamenei in order to defeat outgoing President Mohammad Khatami’s faction after the parliamentary elections in February 2000.

Ahmadinejad’s record is typical of the men chosen by Khamenei’s entourage to put a new face on the clerical elite’s ultra-conservative identity. But beyond the shallow façade, few doubt that the Islamic Republic under its new President will move with greater speed and determination along the path of radical policies that include more human rights abuses, continuing sponsorship of terrorism, and the drive to obtain nuclear weapons.

http://www.850koa.com/shows/newman-news.html#IRANPRES

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