Investigations into spying allegations against three American hikers detained in Iran will be completed soon, Intelligence Minister Heidar Moslehi said in a news report on Saturday.
Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Josh Fattal were detained after they strayed into Iran from northern Iraq at the end of July 2009, further complicating relations between Tehran and Washington already deadlocked over Iran’s nuclear work.
“Investigations about the three Americans will be completed soon. The result will be announced then,” Moslehi said in a report carried by Iran’s student news agency, ISNA. Iran has said the three Americans would be put on trial, without giving a date. They have not formally been charged with spying.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in February that the three US citizens may be swapped for the release of Iranians jailed in the United States. Iran said last year it believed 11 Iranians were being held in the US, including a former deputy defence minister who disappeared in 2007.
The United States, which cut diplomatic ties with Iran shortly after its 1979 Islamic Revolution, has said the charges against the hikers are totally unfounded and they should be released. Under Iran’s Islamic law, espionage can be punishable by death. Families of the trio said they were hiking and had strayed across the border accidentally. Their mothers visited Tehran briefly in May and urged Iranian authorities to release them.
source: Reuters
Iranian judicial authorities say a final verdict in the case of a woman sentenced to death by stoning has not yet been made and defended the country’s legal process amid an outcry over the pending execution, Iranian media reported Saturday.
Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a mother of two, has been sentenced to death for adultery by stoning. Last month, Iran’s top human rights official said the Islamic regime was reviewing her sentence as international outrage emerged over the case.
Iran’s Judiciary High Council of Human Rights in a communique said evidence shows that allegations against Ashtiani “have been proved right” and that Iran’s judiciary operates independently as other justice systems do, the semi-official Iranian Student’s News Agency reported.
“The stance taken by officials of other countries and international authorities on legal issues of countries is a wrong, unfair and biased prejudgment since they do not have access to reliable sources of the counties,” the council said.
The statement came soon after France asked the European Union to come up new approaches to get Iran to stop the pending execution. Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner raised the issue Wednesday with EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, asking that measures be studied to bring Iran to stop such violations of human rights.
“We need to encourage the Union in initiatives to remind Iranian authorities that, as well on the nuclear file, their attitude of isolation has a price, which they can liberate as soon as they choose a more responsible behavior and more in line with their international commitments on the subject of human rights,” Kouchner said in a letter to Ashton published in the French press on Friday.
The International Committee Against Stoning, a human rights group, has said a court has delayed the final verdict of the woman. Iran announced she will not be executed during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ends around September 9.
source: CNN
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