Iran Regime Seizes Elderly Freedom Movement Leader In Hospital!
Apparently reassured by President Obama’s ‘no meddling’ policy, Iranian secret police have arrested 78 year-old Ebrahim Yazdi, founder and leader of the Iranian Freedom Movement and taken him from his ICU bed.
This, from The Times of London:
The Iranian regime has arrested an elderly and ailing reformist while he underwent medical tests in a Tehran hospital in its latest attempt to repress protests against electoral fraud.
Unable to find him when they called at his home, officials tracked down Ebrahim Yazdi, the 78-year-old leader of the banned but officially tolerated Freedom Movement, as he was undergoing stomach tests and took him away to Evin prison, his family and colleagues say.
Mr Yazdi was the foreign minister in Iran’s first government after the 1979 revolution but has been sidelined since hardliners took control.
Hadi Ghaemi, director of the New York-based International Campaign for Human Rights, said that Mr Yazdi was arrested in the intensive care unit.
So far 200 prominent journalists, opposition politicians and reformists have been rounded up by the regime, Mr Ghaemi said, including Mohammad-Reza Jalaipour, an Oxford student and noted Iranian analyst, who was arrested at the airport while trying to leave Iran with his wife, Fatemeh Shams. A plainclothes officer did not give a reason for the arrest, Shams told the BBC’s Farsi website.
Hamid-Reza Jalaipour, Mr Jalaipour’s father, vented his anger in an interview on the website, demanding: “Is it a crime to support Mousavi? That’s my only question now. Man, they have fallen to attacking people’s wives and children.”
When the Polish communist regime attempted to silence opposition by arresting Lech Walensa, a more independent American news media carried front-page headlines for days. Why the deafening silence today? Oh, wait… I forgot… “no meddling”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6527580.ece
