 |
Iran's Conservative Court Accuses Detainees of Having Ties With West
The Tehran Revolutionary Court has accused arrested pro-reformists of conspiring with the West to topple the Islamic regime through armed struggle, the official IRNA news agency reported Saturday.
"They (the detainees) were trying to establish a western-style government. In order to achieve this sinister objective they were considering an active resistance and eventually an armed struggle," a statement of the conservative court was quoted as saying.
It is the first time that the judiciary has accused detained reformists of having links with the West. In March, the court ordered to arrest over 60 religious-nationalist activists on charges of subversive actions.
"The so-called religious-nationalist suspects have confessed to collaborating with exiled dissident groups, including the People's Fadaian, the so-called National Resistance council as well as royalists," the statement said, adding that they were found guilty of having been involved in terrorist activities and inciting riots.
The court accused some of the arrested of meeting with U.S. officials and a representative of the exiled Iranian President Abol-Hassan Banisadr to receive orders for subversive plans.
And others collaborated with Iraq-based terrorist Mujahideen Khalq Organization (MKO) and contacted a foreign embassy in Tehran or held meetings with its officials on a variety of issues, including Iran's elections and future parliamentary plans, said the court.
"According to our investigations, existing evidence as well as the confessions of the suspects showed that those arrested were aiming to topple the system through infiltration and creating gap and disputes among state ranks as well as infringing upon the lofty status of the leadership and other legal institutes," the statement said.
It also said that according to tapes and other documents seized from the suspects, the detainees were considering armed struggle and small-scale assassinations as tactics to try to weaken people's belief in Islam and their trust in the spiritual leaders of the Islamic revolution.
But the detainees have denied such charges, and their arrests have been strongly condemned by reformists, who have denounced the arrests as a conservative ploy to embarrass pro-reform President Mohammad Khatami ahead of the upcoming presidential election due in June.
More than 17 detainees have been released on bail later amid strong condemnation.
In This Section
|