Rice: U.S. probing Iran leader’s role in embassy seizure

Iran Focus: Washington, DC, Jul. 11 – The United States continues its investigation into the role of ultra-conservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 1979 U.S. embassy seizure in Tehran and in holding 51 American diplomats and embassy staff as hostages, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said.
Iran Focus

Washington, DC, Jul. 11 – The United States continues its investigation into the role of ultra-conservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 1979 U.S. embassy seizure in Tehran and in holding 51 American diplomats and embassy staff as hostages, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said.

In an interview with the Fox News Channel while in Beijing, China, Rice said that the United States was still “looking into” the likelihood that Ahmadinejad was directly involved in taking hostages.

“The point that I would make … is that we are not going to forget what happened to our people in Iran, and in fact the international community should not forget that, because the wanton taking of diplomats in that way is a threat to the very foundation of diplomatic representation and to the international system”, Rice commented.

The chief of U.S. diplomacy added that the current administration was taking the issue “very, very seriously”.

Reacting to Rice’s comments, Iran’s government-sponsored website Baztab, which is affiliated to the Revolutionary Guards, wrote that “the seizure of the Nest of Spies [U.S. embassy in Tehran”> remains one of the proud achievements and golden chapters in the history of the Islamic Republic”.