Category Archives: Iran

Iran stops Mahsa Amini’s family from travelling to receive human rights prize

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Ban comes as jailed Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi begins new hunger strike before award ceremony

Iran has banned Mahsa Amini’s family from travelling to France to receive the EU’s top human rights prize on her behalf, as the family of the imprisoned Nobel peace prize winner Narges Mohammadi said she had begun a new hunger strike before Sunday’s award ceremony in Oslo.

In Mohammadi’s absence, her 17-year-old twin children, Ali and Kiana, will instead collect the award on her behalf, reading out a speech their mother smuggled out of her cell.

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‘Deeply worried’ father of Swedish EU diplomat calls for his release by Iran

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Exclusive: Matts Floderus says his son Johan has been through ‘levels of hell in his nearly 600 days in detention

The father of a 33-year-old Swedish citizen and EU diplomat held in captivity in Iran for the past 18 months has revealed the “levels of hell” his son has experienced, as his family and employers step up their fight for his release.

Johan Floderus, who on Friday will have been incarcerated for 600 days in Tehran’s Evin prison with no routine consular visits or phone calls, has been on hunger strike at least five times, his father said.

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Two Revolutionary Guards members killed by Israeli strike in Syria, says Iran

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Airstrikes near Damascus follow end to seven-day pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza Strip

Two Iranian Revolutionary Guards members serving as military advisers in Syria have been killed in an Israeli attack, Iranian state media has said.

Strikes near the Syrian capital of Damascus came less than 24 hours after the end of a seven-day pause in fighting between Israel and the Hezbollah ally Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

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Iran execution of child condemned by UN human rights office

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Seventeen-year-old Hamidreza Azari was executed along with Milad Zohrevand, 22, as UN agency calls for moratorium on capital punishment

The United Nations said Tuesday it deplored the executions of a 17-year-old and a 22-year old in Iran and urged Tehran to immediately stop applying the death penalty.

The UN Human Rights Office said it was troubled by Friday’s executions. “The execution of Hamidreza Azari, who was accused of murder, is the first reported execution of an alleged child offender in Iran this year,” spokesperson Elizabeth Throssell said in a statement.

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Yemen’s Houthi rebels seize cargo ship in Red Sea, calling Israeli vessels ‘legitimate targets’

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Israel says Galaxy Leader is British-owned and describes seizure as an ‘escalation in Iran’s belligerence’

Yemen’s Houthi rebels said they have seized what they called an Israeli cargo ship in the Red Sea, and warned that all vessels linked to Israel “will become a legitimate target for armed forces”.

Houthi forces would “continue to carry out military operations against the Israeli enemy until the aggression against Gaza stops and the ugly crimes … against our Palestinian brothers in Gaza and the West Bank stop”, said a spokesperson for the group, Yahya Saree, in a statement on X.

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Gulf states fend off call from Iran to arm Palestinians at Riyadh summit

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Iranian president had travelled to Saudi Arabia to try to force a more interventionist approach to Israel-Hamas war

Gulf state leaders have fended off an Iranian-led attempt to call for arming the Palestinians and severing all diplomatic ties with Israel at an extraordinary summit in Riyadh, in a effort to retain control of the region’s diplomatic response to the Israeli assault on Gaza.

Tehran, however, insisted on Sunday that its influence remained through its allied “resistance factions” operating in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. In a further sign that it has no intention of jettisoning a military path, militants near the Israeli border with Lebanon fired anti-tank missiles towards Israel, hitting a number of civilians, according to the Israeli military.

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Israel kills seven more Hezbollah fighters on border with Lebanon

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Iranian foreign minister says wider regional conflict inevitable as death toll among militant group rises to 78

Israel has killed a further seven Hezbollah fighters on its northern border with Lebanon, taking the total death toll of Hezbollah fighters to 78 since the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October.

The rising death toll in Lebanon and the killing of 18 Palestinians by Israeli security forces in the West Bank on Thursday prompted the Iranian foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, to declare that a wider regional escalation of the conflict was inevitable.

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Spanish police investigate possible Iran link to shooting of former politician

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Alejandro Vidal-Quadras told police from hospital bed of his links to exiled Iranian opposition, source says

The Spanish rightwing former politician Alejandro Vidal-Quadras is recovering in hospital after being shot in the face on a central Madrid street.

Police said they were not ruling out any theories for the attack on Thursday afternoon, including a possible link to the former European lawmaker’s ties with the Iranian opposition.

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Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has ‘constant worry’ about family in Iran

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British-Iranian imprisoned in Iran for six years speaks of slow recovery from captivity and severance from her Iranian family

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has spoken of her “constant worry” about her family in Iran, saying she cannot return to the country where she was imprisoned for six years.

The British-Iranian also revealed how it had been “very hard to adjust” since returning to the UK in March 2022.

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Dozens killed in blaze at drug rehab centre in Iran

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Investigation under way after 32 people reported to have died in fire in Langarud, north of Tehran

Local media in Iran say 32 people have died in a fire at a drug rehabilitation centre in the north of the country, up from an earlier count of 27.

The death toll from the blaze at the centre in Langarud, a city in the northern Gilan province, was reported by the local ISNA news agency, quoting the province’s deputy governor, Mohammad Jalai.

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Iranian mother jailed for 13 years after denouncing death of son shot at protest

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Mahsa Yazdani convicted of blasphemy and ‘insulting supreme leader’ as Iran regime targets families of those killed in protests

A mother in Iran, whose son was reportedly killed after being shot repeatedly at close range by security forces, has been sentenced to 13 years in prison by an Iranian court after she demanded justice for her child on social media.

Mahsa Yazdani, whose 20-year-old son Mohammad Javad Zahedi was killed at an anti-regime protest in September 2022, was convicted on charges of blasphemy, incitement, insulting the supreme leader, and spreading anti-regime propaganda, according to human rights groups and family members. They say she will serve the first five years with no chance of parole.

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Counter-terror chiefs on alert for Iranian activity in UK exploiting Gaza war

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Israel-Hamas conflict raises fears Iran might seek to encourage radical groups or terrorist activities in Britain

British counter-terrorism officers are monitoring closely if Iran will try to exploit the Israel-Hamas war for its own ends in the UK, amid wider anxieties that Tehran is an increasing security menace to dissidents and critics.

Concerns about Russia and China are well established, but Iran’s campaign of intimidation and harassment has been the most visible development in the domestic threat picture over the last 12 months.

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Why did the US launch airstrikes on Syria and what happens next?

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The war in Gaza risks developing into a wider conflict, but for now, the actions seem to be more about messaging between Washington and Tehran

Over the last 10 days, US military bases in eastern Syria and western Iraq have been hit by rockets and drones. There have been 22 such attacks, although details are sketchy and some may not have been counted. More than 20 US service personnel have been injured, though not seriously, and a civilian contractor died of cardiac arrest.

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Iran’s Mahsa Amini awarded EU’s Sakharov human rights prize

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Top MEP says Iranian woman’s death in police custody last year ‘triggered a movement that is making history’

Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who died in police custody in Iran last year, sparking worldwide protests against the country’s conservative Islamic theocracy, has been awarded the EU’s top human rights prize.

The award, named for the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, was created in 1988 to honour individuals or groups who defend human rights and fundamental freedoms. Sakharov, a Nobel peace prize laureate, died in 1989.

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More protests expected across Middle East after Gaza hospital blast

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Hezbollah calls for ‘day of rage’ as both sides in war continue to trade blame for deadly explosion

Further furious rallies and protests are expected across the Middle East and north Africa on Wednesday after the blast at a Gaza hospital that left hundreds dead and injured.

Hamas has blamed Tuesday’s explosion at al-Ahli Arab hospital on an Israeli airstrike. The Israeli military says the hospital was hit by a rocket barrage launched by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group, which has denied responsibility.

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Gaza residents told to move south as Israel prepares for expected ground assault

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UN says Israeli military has given 1.1 million Gaza residents 24 hours to move amid warnings it could cause ‘devastating humanitarian consequences’

Israel’s military has delivered sweeping evacuation orders for almost half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people ahead of an expected ground offensive aiming to eradicate the Hamas militant group after its unprecedented assault on Israel, UN officials said.

The order sent panic through civilians and aid workers already struggling under Israeli airstrikes and a blockade.

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Iranian intellectual calls on opposition to unite as he is again sent to prison

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Majid Tavakoli, taken from his family in handcuffs, urges dissidents to ‘frankly analyse’ why opposition to the regime has successively failed

One of Iran’s foremost public intellectuals and critics of the Iranian regime was taken to prison in handcuffs on Saturday to start serving a five-year sentence.

Majid Tavakoli, who has a three-year-old child, was found guilty of spreading propaganda against the state. His dispatch to jail had been deferred for three weeks, but security officials came to take him away on Saturday, the day after another jailed Iranian human rights activist, Narges Mohammadi, was given the Nobel peace prize.

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Jailed Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi wins Nobel peace prize

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Mohammadi wins prize for her fight against oppression of women in Iran and to promote human rights for all

Narges Mohammadi, the most prominent of Iran’s jailed women’s rights advocates, has vowed to stay in the country and continue her activism after winning the 2023 Nobel peace prize.

“I will never stop striving for the realisation of democracy, freedom and equality,” she said in a prewritten statement released after the announcement. “Surely, the Nobel peace prize will make me more resilient, determined, hopeful and enthusiastic on this path, and it will accelerate my pace.”

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US supplies Ukraine with a million rounds of ammunition seized from Iran

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Justice department claimed ownership of the ordnance on the grounds that they were being smuggled to Yemeni Houthi forces, breaching a UN embargo

The United States has supplied Ukraine with more than a million rounds of Iranian ammunition confiscated in the Gulf late last year.

The transfer of the ordnance followed a civil forfeiture case pursued by the justice department to gain ownership on the grounds that the bullets were seized as they were being smuggled to Yemeni Houthi forces in violation of a UN arms embargo.

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Hospitalisation of Iranian girl leads to claims against ‘morality police’

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Incident puts country back on edge a year after mass protests over death in custody of Mahsa Amini

The hospitalisation of a 16-year-old girl in Tehran has led to accusations by a rights group and activists that she was beaten into a coma by Iran’s feared “morality police”, putting the country back on edge a year after mass protests erupted over the treatment of women.

Footage of the incident showed a girl being carried off a train by other girls at a metro station and placed on the platform, where she stays still, apparently unconscious.

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