Iran Focus

London, 03 Feb – New York – A former consultant to Iran’s mission to the United Nations was sentenced to three months in prison on Friday for evading taxes by concealing his income and helping family and friends make money transfers that violated U.S. sanctions against Iran, Reuters reported.

Ahmad Sheikhzadeh, an Iran-born U.S. citizen, made the unusual decision to take the witness stand at his sentencing hearing before U.S. District Judge Pamela Chen in Brooklyn. He strongly denied accusations made by prosecutors in a court filing last year that he acted improperly by arranging contacts between a nuclear scientist and Iranian officials while Iran was negotiating a treaty with the U.S. over its nuclear program.

Iran Focus

London, 02 Feb – A child sexual abuse scandal that was dismissed by the Iranian judiciary because of the defendant’s ties to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is still being fought by the families of the victims.

The relatives of the victims, who filed a case teacher Saeed Toosi, wrote to 16 members of the Iranian Parliament to ask for help to seek justice after learning that a judge had secretly ruled in favour of Toosi, according to Tehran MP Mahmoud Sadeghi.

Toosi is a close companion of Khamenei’s, his favourite Quran reciter, and even trained Khamenei’s son, the mid-ranking cleric Mojtaba.

Iran Focus

London, 02 Feb – Despite being the most repressive country in the Middle East and using absolute clerical rule to justify their medieval treatment of their citizens as the “will of God”, the Iranian mullahs were simply unable to stop the people from protesting.

The protests, which began in late December over the release of a draft budget that would divert money away from the poor and into the military, quickly spread from the big cities to the smallest villages in every province and took on an anti-regime sentiment that none has matched since perhaps 1979. Millions took to the streets to call for an end to the Regime and the removal of the mullahs, explicitly calling out President Hassan Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Iran Focus

London, 01 Feb – The widespread protests in Iran have largely dissipated after a violent crackdown by the Iranian authorities, but the underlying issues that caused the protests still exist, so we should be wary of seeing this as an end to the Iranian people’s uprising.

One of the issues raised by the protesters was Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism and regional warfare (i.e. Syria, Lebanon and Yemen) and the money spent on this rather than on programmes to benefit the Iranian people (i.e. healthcare, education, employment). In response, the Ruling system pulled back some of its security forces from Syria, in order to suppress the protests.