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Iran dissidents, Nobel prize winner mark fifth anniversary of serial murders
TEHRAN (AFP) - Around 2,500 people gathered in a Tehran mosque to mark the fifth anniversary of the grisly murders by intelligence agents of two prominent Iranian dissidents, voicing renewed calls for justice and a shake-up of the Islamic regime.
The mourners marking the November 22, 1998 murders of Daryush Foruhar and his wife Parvaneh Eskandari included this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, who was given loud applause as she entered the mosque.
Many in the crowd chanted slogans including "referendum, referendum", "political prisoners should be freed" and "participation in elections: treason" -- a call for the boycott of next February's parliamentary elections.
There were also brief clashes between the mourners and some 40 members of the hardline Islamic vigilante group Ansar Hezbollah, an AFP correspondent at the scene witnessed.
But police armed with batons were also out in force to prevent any serious violence.
The dissident couple were found dead in their homes, having been repeatedly stabbed, with their bodies left in a pool of blood and facing Mecca.
Daryoush Forouhar, who was 70, had been a minister of labour in the left-leaning government that followed the 1979 Islamic revolution, and went on to be highly critical of the regime as head of the banned-but-tolerated Iran National Party.
The killings were among a number of gruesome murders of anti-regime activists, which authorities here eventually blamed on "rogue agents" from the intelligence ministry.
But the trials of the 10 agents allegedly involved in the killings were held in private, while the main suspect -- then deputy intelligence minister Saeed Emani -- was reported to have committed suicide in prison by drinking hair remover, a development that only raised more suspicions over the killings.
And a reformist journalist, Akbar Ganji, was later jailed after he wrote a series of articles alleging that senior officials had actually ordered the serial killings.
Also among the mourners was Ebrahim Yazdi, the head of the nationalist-religious Iran Freedom Movement. But both he and Ebadi, a prominent women's rights activist and lawyer who has taken on the cases of several dissidents and has angered hardliners here, made no comments to the press.
But Parastoo Foruhar, the daughter of the murdered couple, voiced her bitterness at Iran's judiciary, a bastion of the Islamic republic's religious right.
"The show that Iran's judiciary put on in the name of justice was a double blow against the dead and those left behind," she told the gathering. "It was an oppression of a nation seeking justice."
"The people who objected to this distorted case and insisted on revealing the truth had to pay a very heavy price," she added, pointing to a wave of arrests of dissidents and the shut down of pro-reform newspapers by the judiciary.
The killings, she said, had been exploited as part of "political leverage between rival political groups" while "justice was sacrificed for expediency".
Mohsen Kadivar, the head of Iran's centre for the protection of journalists, said the family had been left with little other choice but to lodge a complaint with the United Nations (news - web sites) High Commissioner for Human Rights.
"Nobody in Iran is listening to the case," he said
Iran dissidents, Nobel prize winner mark fifth anniversary of serial murders
TEHRAN (AFP) - Around 2,500 people gathered in a Tehran mosque to mark the fifth anniversary of the grisly murders by intelligence agents of two prominent Iranian dissidents, voicing renewed calls for justice and a shake-up of the Islamic regime.
The mourners marking the November 22, 1998 murders of Daryush Foruhar and his wife Parvaneh Eskandari included this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, who was given loud applause as she entered the mosque.
Many in the crowd chanted slogans including "referendum, referendum", "political prisoners should be freed" and "participation in elections: treason" -- a call for the boycott of next February's parliamentary elections.
There were also brief clashes between the mourners and some 40 members of the hardline Islamic vigilante group Ansar Hezbollah, an AFP correspondent at the scene witnessed.
But police armed with batons were also out in force to prevent any serious violence.
The dissident couple were found dead in their homes, having been repeatedly stabbed, with their bodies left in a pool of blood and facing Mecca.
Daryoush Forouhar, who was 70, had been a minister of labour in the left-leaning government that followed the 1979 Islamic revolution, and went on to be highly critical of the regime as head of the banned-but-tolerated Iran National Party.
The killings were among a number of gruesome murders of anti-regime activists, which authorities here eventually blamed on "rogue agents" from the intelligence ministry.
But the trials of the 10 agents allegedly involved in the killings were held in private, while the main suspect -- then deputy intelligence minister Saeed Emani -- was reported to have committed suicide in prison by drinking hair remover, a development that only raised more suspicions over the killings.
And a reformist journalist, Akbar Ganji, was later jailed after he wrote a series of articles alleging that senior officials had actually ordered the serial killings.
Also among the mourners was Ebrahim Yazdi, the head of the nationalist-religious Iran Freedom Movement. But both he and Ebadi, a prominent women's rights activist and lawyer who has taken on the cases of several dissidents and has angered hardliners here, made no comments to the press.
But Parastoo Foruhar, the daughter of the murdered couple, voiced her bitterness at Iran's judiciary, a bastion of the Islamic republic's religious right.
"The show that Iran's judiciary put on in the name of justice was a double blow against the dead and those left behind," she told the gathering. "It was an oppression of a nation seeking justice."
"The people who objected to this distorted case and insisted on revealing the truth had to pay a very heavy price," she added, pointing to a wave of arrests of dissidents and the shut down of pro-reform newspapers by the judiciary.
The killings, she said, had been exploited as part of "political leverage between rival political groups" while "justice was sacrificed for expediency".
Mohsen Kadivar, the head of Iran's centre for the protection of journalists, said the family had been left with little other choice but to lodge a complaint with the United Nations (news - web sites) High Commissioner for Human Rights.
"Nobody in Iran is listening to the case," he said
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