Iran’s new president plans New York trip despite U.S. inquiry

Iran Focus: London, Jul. 29 – Iran’s ultra-conservative President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be heading to New York in mid-September to take part in the opening ceremonies of the General Assembly of the United Nations, a semi-official Iranian news agency reported on Friday. Fars News Agency said that Iran’s hard-line Majlis (Parliament) Speaker Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel would be going to New York about a week in advance of Ahmadinejad’s planned trip. Iran Focus

London, Jul. 29 – Iran’s ultra-conservative President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be heading to New York in mid-September to take part in the opening ceremonies of the General Assembly of the United Nations, a semi-official Iranian news agency reported on Friday.

Fars News Agency said that Iran’s hard-line Majlis (Parliament) Speaker Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel would be going to New York about a week in advance of Ahmadinejad’s planned trip.

Ahmadinejad is expected to address the UN General Assembly to reject suspicions that Iran’s nuclear program is geared to produce nuclear weapons.

News of the planned visits comes a day after White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters that Iran’s president-elect was a leader in the student movement that organised the 1979 United States embassy siege and that the U.S. was still determining whether he was a hostage-taker himself.

“We’ve looked into the allegations that were made about his involvement in the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. We know he was a leader of the student movement that organised the attack on the embassy and the taking of American hostages”, McClellan said on Thursday.

Several former American hostages who were held captive in Iran for 444 days have asserted that that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was involved in the embassy takeover. One hostage has said that Ahmadinejad personally interrogated him while he was being held in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison.

“Ahmadinejad’s presence in New York is bound to embarrass the U.S. administration”, Massoud Zabeti, a London-based analyst for Iran Focus said, “How to react will be a dilemma for Washington. As president of a member-state of the UN, Ahmadinejad will have immunity from prosecution. Yet he faces serious allegations, from interrogating U.S. hostages in Tehran to being part of the hit squad that assassinated prominent Iranian dissidents in Europe in the 1990s”.

Another obstacle that could affect Ahmadinejad’s chances of making it to U.S. soil is his background in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and his suspected involvement in terrorist attacks outside Iran.

The United States considers the Revolutionary Guards a terrorist-sponsoring military organisation.