Four men were killed while trying to sneak into Iran through its eastern borders, commander of Iranian forces deployed along the borders Brigadier Hussein Tho Al-Fakar said Monday.

The incident took place in the Sistan and Balochistan region located along the eastern borders of Iran, Fakar said, noting that six others escaped to a neighboring country.

Drug dealers and armed militia members try to break into the Iranian borders through Pakistan and Afghanistan and terrorize, kill and kidnap citizens, Iranian News Agency Mehr quoted Tho Al-Fakar as saying.

Meanwhile, Iranian authorities hold Jundallah militia group, led by Abdolmalek Rigi, responsible for the suicidal attack that took place at the Sistan and Balochistan region along the Pakistani borders.

A number of leaders of Revolutionary Guard Corps and heads of tribes were killed during the attack.KUNA

Seven Kurdish student Tehran University to protest the death of Ehsan Fatahian were arrested is not known.

Thirteen representative parliament in a letter to the authorities they were asked to release the students.

Name arrested students is as follows:

1 - Ahmad Ismaili Student audit of Economic Affairs 2 - Amanj Rahimi Economic Affairs University Student Insurance Management 3 - Abdullah Arefi Allameh University 4 - Pakhshan Azizi student Applied Social Science University 5 - Leila Mohammadi University of Physical Education student Zahra 6 - Serweh Waisi student Zahra University of Physical Education 7 - Hajar Yousefi Applied Science University of Agriculture student.

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran's official news agency reports a former vice president has been released on bail in the mass trial of opposition figures accused of fomenting the country's postelection unrest.

Mohammad Ali Abtahi, who served as vice president during former President Mohammad Khatami's two terms from 1997-2005, was sentenced to six years in prison, his lawyer said earlier Sunday.

Official news agency IRNA quotes the Tehran prosecutor, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, as saying Mohammad Ali Abtahi was released on a $700,000 bail after the verdict was delivered. It did not say what his sentence was.

Abtahi is the most senior former official among more than 100 people on trial over the protests that followed the disputed June 12 presidential election.

Iran's moral police have arrested a dozen couples for engaging in illicit sexual acts, including swapping of partners, the conservative Jomhuri Eslami reported on Monday.

The report said the couples and another individual were running a website, Iran Multiplication, which was aimed at promoting illicit sexual relations.

The couples were said to have carried out sexual acts in the presence of each other and several times with multiple partners, the report added.

Those arrested held university degrees, while some were government employees and had children.

The paper gave no further details about their identities or when or where they were arrested.

Extra-marital sex is illegal in Iran where Islamic sharia law is the principal source of legislation. If found guilty of adultery, those arrested in the crackdown face being stoned to death.

Reports of partner-swapping are a rarity in conservative Iran, but in March the elite Revolutionary Guards said it had launched a crackdown on several groups who had set up anti-Islamic and pornographic Internet sites.

The Guards, set up to defend the ideals of the Islamic republic, said they has "dismantled several networks that had set up anti-religious, anti-revolution and obscene Internet sites."

Among those also targeted are people deemed to be Satan worshippers, while moral police often also carry out raids on concerts and parties as part of their tough crackdown on "un-Islamic" attire and behaviour.
AFP

In the wake of the Sykes-Picot Treaty in 1918, and the subsequent division of Kurdistan among Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, the people of Kurdistan experienced the most unprecedented atrocities against them in the modern history. Each respective nation used all the means in its disposal to assimilate the Kurds into its own national melting pot. When the Kurds resisted the repressive policies and strived to protect their national identity they were physically and culturally subjected to the policy of annihilation. Three cultures have been imposed upon the Kurds and their native culture has become taboo for them to practice-punishable by imprisonment or death.

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Kurdish Southeastern region of Turkey, — The people of Tunceli are eagerly awaiting the restoration of the city’s former name, Dersim, and hoping that recent discussions of their city .
Even before the recent discussions about the city, the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) submitted a bill in February proposing that the name of the city be reverted to Dersim.

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30 hanged in Ahvaz during the past 8 months

The Iranian regime has hanged three prisoners in the central city of Esfahan in public. The Fars News Agency, affiliated with the regime’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, wrote on November 19, 2009, that the hangings were carried out in the presence of Mohammad Reza Habibi, the regime’s prosecutor in Esfahan.

Separately, the regime’s prosecutor in the southern city of Ahvaz, Sadeghi, has confessed to the hanging of 30 prisoners in the past 8 months in Ahvaz. According to Fars on November 18, Sadeghi said 13 people charged with drug smuggling, three charged with “waging war against God,” one for theft, in addition to 13 others have been hanged in the city under the clerical regime’s punitive law known as “Qesas” or retribution. The official did not divulge further information about the names and particulars of the victims.

Regime officials in Isfahan and Ahvaz proclaim that the reasons for the hangings are “upholding security,” “serving justice,” and “refusing leniency towards criminals.”

In recent days officials of the clerical regime, including the Chief Prosecutor, Mohseni Ejei, have emphasized the carrying out of “maximum punishment” with regards to alleged offenders, while state-run media close to the regime’s Supreme Leader, ceaselessly disseminate news of hangings in order to terrify people.

The Iranian Resistance calls on all international human rights organizations, especially the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, to condemn the sentencing and carrying out of hangings in Iran, and demands the implementation of binding and urgent measures aimed to end the growing trend of human rights violations in Iran with special attention to the cruel punishment of hanging. NCRI

Former Iranian interior minister Ali Kordan has died at the age of 51 from an incurable type of blood cancer at a hospital in Tehran.

Kordan had long been struggling with multiple myeloma, the cancer of a type of white blood cells found in the bone marrow and known as plasma cells.

Kordan, who had became really weak because of receiving chemotherapy agents, was hospitalized in the intensive care unit of Masih Daneshvari Hospital in Tehran due to flu-like symptoms. He was then diagnosed with A/H1N1 flu.

He thereafter developed intracranial hemorrhage and was dependent on the mechanical ventilation for breathing during the past few days.

A former revolutionary guard, Kordan was appointed deputy oil minister in around October 2007. He had turned down the offer of the same position in 2006.

He served briefly as the minister of the interior between August and November 2008, when the Iranian parliament voted to dismiss him following his impeachment. Press TV

SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq (AFP) – Iraqi President Jalal Talabani flew to Tehran on Sunday to appeal for the lives of Iranian Kurds sentenced to death, a newspaper website reported.

"President Talabani on Sunday pays a secret visit to Tehran to ask President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to intervene with the chief of the judiciary to avoid the execution of Iranian Kurds," said the Sulaimaniyah-based Awina journal.

Officials in Baghdad could not immediately confirm the visit.

Kurdish lawmakers in Iran last week asked the judiciary in the Islamic republic to reconsider issuing death sentences on people from the Kurdish minority, fearing it was alienating the ethnic group from the regime.

Iran's ILNA news agency reported that an unspecified number of Kurdish MPs had addressed their concern in a letter to judiciary chief Sadeq Larijani.

Their concern comes after an Iranian Kurd, Ehsan Fatahian, was executed despite the intervention of the lawmakers who said he had earlier been given a 10-year jail sentence by a lower court, ILNA said.

The letter stated that "a number of Kurdish youths have been given death penalties recently which is worrying the Kurdistan province," ILNA said, quoting the letter.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran must show its divine image in the country and outside... and the government should not act in a way that creates distance between Kurdish people and the regime," it added.

Çayan Demirel has turned the events that occurred at Diyarbakır Prison No.5 during and after the 1980 military coup into a documentary based on eye-witness accounts. DTP chairman Ahmet Türk is a former inmate of the prison.
Many politicians, artists, journalists and academics in Turkey were put on trial and then sent to prison during and after the coup. The torture they were subjected to in the prisons has been slowly revealed over the years.

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The Kurdistan Peace and Development Society has published a report on the Human Rights Situation in Iranian Kurdistan. The report studies the current human rights condition in Iranian Kurdistan under the clerical regime of Iran.

In the early days of the revolution of 1979 in Iran when the Kurds had once more materialized the reams of freedom and self-rule as in the self-governing Republic of 1946, the leading Iranian Kurdish political parties, notably Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (PDKI) issued an eight-point programme for Kurdish autonomy to Khomeini. The newly established clerical regime rejected the PDKI’s demands because any self-governing region within Iran contradicted their totalitarian grand plan that they had in mind for Iran. In response, Khomeini’s regime declared a holy war on the Kurdish people in Iran, and this war has continued to this date resulting in the death and imprisonment of thousands of innocent people in Kurdistan and the destruction of Kurdish society, culture, economy and environment.

The report examines the civil society, economy and as well as gross human rights violations against the Kurdish population.

For a copy of the report please click here