on Wednesday, as Berlin responded to the Iranian Foreign Ministrys charges that it was playing a role in a Zionist conspiracy against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran Focus
Such a statement comes from a country where human rights are constantly violated, where women are publicly flogged after dubious sentences, and where dissidents are held in solitary confinement for months without the possibility of legal assistance. They hardly have a right to complain”, German Interior Ministry Spokesman Rainer Lingenthal said on Wednesday.
Lingenthal said the Iranian Foreign Ministrys reaction to remarks by German Interior Minister Otto Schily amounted to “unbelievable insolence”.
Schily, who as Interior Minister is the German governments top cabinet member in the fight against terrorism, oversees the countrys security and intelligence services. He told Spiegel magazine in an interview published on Monday that while Iran and Iraq are saying that they want to be closer, the coming to power in Iran of an Islamic fundamentalist who does not have an absolute distance with terrorism gives cause for grave concern.
The German Interior Ministers remarks infuriated the clerical government in Iran. Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi said, Such unfounded accusations against the President-elect are an affront to the Iranian peoples vote.
I advise this German official to remove himself from being under the influence of Zionists, he added.
Prior to becoming Interior Minister, Otto Schily was one of the main lawyers representing the victims families in the high-profile trial of four men in Berlin accused of assassinating Iranian dissidents in September 1992. The three-and-a-half year trial ended in April 1997 with a ruling that found Irans senior leaders, including the Supreme Leader and the President, responsible for ordering the assassination of Iranian dissidents abroad.
As the mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad showed his enmity towards Germany by ordering two memorial plaques in April 2004 to be installed in Tehran to blame Germany for supplying Iraq with chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
Ahmadinejads decision was in retaliation for the Berlin city councils decision to place a commemorative plaque in the neighbourhood where the Iranian dissidents were gunned down.
On Sunday, Ahmadinejad replied to the message of congratulation by German President Horst Koehler with an unusual reference to the allegation that Germany provided Saddam Husseins government with chemical weapons.
“Iran in the past three decades has borne many victims incurred by the chemical weapons gifted to Saddam Hossein by some industrial nations, Ahmadinejad wrote.
