INTERNATIONALARAB TIMES, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2016

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Iran’s Vice-President and Environment Minister, Massoumeh Ebtekar, speaks to an AFP journalist dur-ing an interview in the capital Tehran on Oct 29. (AFP)

The deaths of Mohammad Kamrani, Amir Javadifar and Mohsen Ruholamini from injuries sustained during their detention in Kahrizak prison in south Tehran caused a public uproar, and the jail was shut down on the orders of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Nonetheless, Ahmedinejad appointed Mortazavi as head of the anti-smuggling office and later put him in charge of the wealthy social welfare organisation between 2012 and 2013.

Mortazavi, who was targeted by US sanctions over “sus-tained and severe violations of human rights” during his time as prosecutor, was disbarred in November 2014. (AFP)

Indonesia jails Uighur radical: A Uighur radical with links to an Islamic State militant was jailed for six years Wednesday for planning bomb attacks in Indonesia against a Shia mosque and a top-ranking policeman.

Nur Muhammet Abdullah Al Faris was arrested last December on the outskirts of Jakarta and charged over his part in plotting the planned assaults.

Al Faris had planned to assassinate Jakarta’s police chief and orchestrate a suicide bombing at a mosque used by members of the Muslim Shia minority, a court heard. Neither of the intended attacks went ahead.

“The defendant is declared to be convincingly guilty of committing an evil conspiracy and assisting terrorism offences,” Judge Novry Tammy Oroh told a Jakarta court.

The court heard that Al Faris — a member of China’s mostly Muslim Uighur ethnic minority — hatched the plots under the guidance of Bahrun Naim, a leading Indonesian militant fighting with the Islamic State group.

Naim has been linked to several botched attacks in his homeland, ranging from a plot to fire a rocket at Singapore to a suicide attack on a police station. (AFP)

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MH370 plunged ‘rapidly’: Flight MH370 was likely out of control when it plunged into the ocean with its wing flaps not prepared for landing, a new report said Wednesday, casting doubt on theories a pilot was still in charge.

Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014 carrying 239 passengers and crew.

The report by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau found the plane’s final satellite communications were “consistent with the aircraft being in a high and increasing rate of descent” when it vanished.

Analysis of the right outboard flap — which was found off Tanzania — showed it was “most likely in the retract-ed position”, suggesting the plane was not configured for landing before it smashed into the ocean.

The new finding casts doubt on theories proposed by some analysts that a pilot had been flying the plane when it landed in the sea. (AFP)

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S. Korean president replaces PM: South Korean President Park Geun-Hye replaced her prime minister and finance minister Wednesday, as she scrambled to contain a damaging scandal over a close friend accused of med-dling in state affairs.

The top-level reshuffle, which also saw a new public safety minister, was the latest attempt to appease growing public anger with the president and her administration.

Park has been engulfed in a political storm over allega-tions that she allowed long-time friend Choi Soon-Sil, who holds no political position, to vet her speeches and have a voice in policy decisions — including cabinet appointments.

Choi is currently being detained and questioned by prosecutors over her links to Park and other allegations of influence-peddling and embezzlement.

A spokesman at the Seoul Prosecutors Office said a for-mal request had been made Wednesday to a local court to issue an arrest warrant for Choi on charges of fraud and abuse of power. (AFP)

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China, Malaysia navies to cooperate: China and Malaysia said their navies will cooperate more in the politically sensitive South China Sea in an agreement signed Tuesday during a visit by Malaysia’s leader, who is seeking stronger ties with Beijing as he tries to offset a financial scandal at home.

Prime Minister Najib Razak hopes to use his visit to Beijing this week to woo new investment and boost his image as he is shunned by Western leaders over the scan-dal, which has prompted a US government investigation, analysts say.

He was given a red carpet welcome Tuesday by his Chinese counterpart, Li Keqiang. After meeting at the Great Hall of the People, they oversaw the signing of agreements, including a memorandum of understanding on defense cooperation.

“We have not touched upon the details of our coopera-tion. Mostly we are focusing on naval cooperation,” Vice-Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin told reporters afterward. As China and Malaysia are both South China Sea coastal nations, “we need to enhance our naval cooperation to ensure peace and stability in the South China Sea and enhance our mutual trust,” he said. (AP)

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Malaysia signs deal to buy warships: Malaysia will buy four combat vessels from China in a “landmark” defence deal, Prime Minister Najib Razak said, signalling a potential strategic shift away from the United States.

The agreement marked the first time Kuala Lumpur had purchased warships from Beijing and came only two weeks after Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte announced his “separation” from Washington during a visit to China.

Under the terms of the deal, two of the vessels will be built in Malaysia and two in China, Najib said in an op-ed published in the China Daily newspaper on Wednesday during his week-long trip to Beijing.

“I call this a landmark decision because before this we have not bought such vessels from China,” Najib said after talks with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Tuesday, according to Malaysian newspaper The Star. (AFP)

Iran leader slams US election: Iran’s supreme leader said Wednesday that the level of debate between the US presidential election frontrunners showed the “catastrophe” of American politics and warned against any further negotiations with Washington.

“These two candidates (Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump) show the catastrophic reality which goes beyond what even we were saying,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech reported on his website.

“Their statements are proof of the destruction of human values in the United States,” Khamenei said.

“The trampling of human values and human rights, racial discrimination and racism are the reality in American society.”

Khamenei’s speech came as Iran marked the 37th anni-versary of the storming of the US embassy in Tehran by radical students, who took more than 50 staff hostage for 444 days sparking a rupture of diplomatic relations that lasts to this day.

He said Iran’s continued exclusion from the global banking system despite the lifting of international sanc-tions under a nuclear deal with world powers showed the United States could not be trusted. (AFP)

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Tehran ex-prosecutor gets 135 lashes: Tehran’s notorious former chief prosecutor, Said Mortazavi, has been sentenced to 135 lashes for misappropriation and waste of public money while head of Iran’s welfare pro-gramme, Iranian media reported Wednesday.

Mortazavi “was sentenced to 70 lashes for misappropri-ation of public goods and 65 lashes for negligence and waste of public goods,” said Mostafa Torkhamedani, law-yer for workers at the Social Security Organisation who brought the case against him, according to IRIB news agency.

A close ally of hardline former president Mahmud Ahmedinejad, Mortazavi became a hate figure among Iranian reformists during his six years as chief prosecutor for shutting down dozens of their publications and jailing journalists.

He was suspended in 2010 after parliament held him responsible for the deaths in custody of at least three anti-government protesters during the previous year’s mass demonstrations against Ahmedinejad’s controversial re-election.

Asia

Iran Hostage crisis important to Iran’s politics

‘We were the WikiLeaks’TEHRAN, Nov 2, (AFP): The Iranian students who stormed the US embassy in 1979 and released thousands of secret CIA documents were the WikiLeaks of their time, their former lead spokesperson has told AFP.

Every year on Nov 3-4, Iran celebrates the 444-day siege of the embassy when more than 50 diplomats, staff and spies were taken hostage by Islamist students demand-ing the extradition of the shah, who had fled to America after being deposed a few months earlier in the Islamic revolution.

Massoumeh Ebtekar is now Iran’s vice-president and one of its most recognisable politicians, feted globally for her work as head of the environment department.

But back then, she was a 20-year-old medical student — nicknamed “Mary” by the international press — who became the face of the hostage crisis thanks to her fluent English.

She now regrets the diplomatic isolation that followed the embassy siege, but she is still proud of their work in releasing documents found in the CIA’s files — some painstakingly reassembled after embassy staff frantically shredded as many as possible when the students stormed the building.

“Revealing these documents was very similar to what WikiLeaks is doing these days. It was the WikiLeaks of those ages,” Ebtekar told AFP.

The documents unveiled the CIA’s attempts to recruit leading Iranian politicians — including a liberal who became the first post-revolution president, Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr.

Although he denied being on the CIA payroll, the alle-gations contributed to his decision to flee the country.

“The hostage crisis ... is hugely important to Iran’s domestic politics. It was used as a weapon to destroy the opposition,” said Michael Axworthy, a British historian who has published several books on Iran.

Ebtekar says the documents, later compiled in 77 vol-umes of “Documents from the US Espionage Den”, also showed how Washington was working to subvert popular

uprisings around the world.“(It) was a very important milestone in terms of global

politics,” she said.Despite her past, Ebtekar is now a firm supporter of her

government’s efforts to rebuild ties with the West through last year’s nuclear deal.

“Even the students who took part in (the siege), many of them believe that maybe in some aspects, relationships could have been maintained in a more rational manner,” she told AFP.

But she remains unrepentant about the hostage crisis. At the time, the students were convinced the US was pre-paring another coup to reverse the revolution.

“They were not militants, radicals. They thought there was an imminent danger ... of another coup d’etat that would have led to the downfall of the very young and fragile Islamic revolution.”

CoupSuch fears were not completely unfounded. Looming

large in every Iranian’s mind was the 1953 CIA-organised coup in which the US and Britain conspired to overthrow the enormously popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had dared to nationalise Iran’s oil resources.

“They installed a government that was a puppet to American policies for 25 years, a tyrant who had imposed dictatorship, very dark ages for Iran,” said Ebtekar.

Washington’s decision to grant asylum to the deposed shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was seen as proof of the plot.

However, historians now say it was unlikely a conspiracy was brewing, not least since Pahlavi had terminal cancer.

“The strong impression is that the US government was thrashing around, really not sure what was happening,” said Axworthy.

“There was a degree of paranoia on the part of the stu-dents, but that’s not necessarily unreasonable. (The 1953 coup) had a huge influence on how people viewed the actions of the US and UK.”