iranpressnews-According to received reports, Prisoner of Conscience, Mehran Kowsari who last year was imprisoned for being Bahaii, was released on Wednesday, March 15th at 17:30 p.m. Tehran time.

Also, Mr. Mohsen Dastkar and Ms. Elham Afroutan, two prisoners from the editorial staff of Tamaddon'eh Hormozgan publication whose cases were being handled by the regimes authorities are now having their cases investigated by the revolutionary court in Tehran for a final decision.

UNITED NATIONS – AP- U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said Thursday the U.N. Security Council appears determined to send a "strong and clear signal" to Tehran about its suspect nuclear program, after a meeting of the powerful U.N. body that he described as the best so far.

In an informal gathering of the 15 council members, diplomats agreed to hold the first formal Security Council consultations on Friday a sign that a split between Britain, France and the United States on the one hand, and China and Russia on the other, may have closed somewhat.

In addition, senior officials from six key countries involved in negotiations over Iran's nuclear program will convene Monday to try to hammer out a final deal and discuss what the council ought to do after it makes its first statement on Iran.

"I would describe today's meetings as the best we've had so far," Bolton said after the talks, the full council's second informal meeting on Iran. "The mood of the discussion is certainly in the direction of a strong and clear signal to Iran on the part of the Security Council."

Members of the council have grappled with the issue for a week, since the board of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, sent a report on Iran to the Security Council. The board said it lacked confidence in Tehran's nuclear intentions and accused Iran of violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Britain, France and the United States want the Security Council to call on Iran to abandon uranium enrichment and comply with other demands by the IAEA to clear up suspicions about its program. They suspect Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb.

Russia and China, which are allies of Iran, are not as skeptical of Tehran's intentions, and have said in the past that tough council action could spark an Iranian withdrawal from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and expulsion of inspectors from the IAEA. They also fear a chain reaction of council action that could lead to tougher measures later on, such as sanctions.

Uranium enrichment can be used either in electricity generation or to make nuclear weapons. Iran insists its program is to produce nuclear energy not weapons but the International Atomic Energy Agency has raised concerns that Tehran might be seeking nuclear arms.

Bolton and the ambassadors from France and Britain refused to discuss what progress had been made.

But diplomats said that Britain and France, who have taken the lead on crafting a council response, planned to draw up a text and present it to the rest of the council at Friday's closed-door discussion.

"We moved forward," France's U.N. Ambassador Jean-Marc de La Sabliere said.

China's U.N. Ambassador Wang Guangya was more equivocal in brief remarks to the press.

"I think the differences are still there," he said. "There are some common points but there are also some differences."

It's unlikely the council will come to a final decision before Monday, when senior officials from the council's five veto-wielding nations the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China and Germany will meet in New York.

That meeting would bring together the most senior foreign affairs officials from those nations since a London gathering on Jan. 30.

Bolton told reporters that the top diplomats would talk about what to do after the first council action. He described those talks as separate from the issue of the text discussed Thursday.

The diplomats will try to come up with a "clear strategy" on what happens next, Russia's Deputy U.N. Ambassador Konstantin Dolgov told The Associated Press. "We need to have an agreed way ahead within the IAEA, in the Security Council."

Iran Focus
Twenty-two Iranian government and provincial officials were killed in an ambush in the south-eastern province of Sistan-va-Baluchistan in the early hours of Friday morning, the government-owned news agency Fars reported.
The incident occurred at 1:20 am as a convoy packed with officials was returning from a gathering in Zabol to the city of Zahedan.
Unidentified gunmen opened fire on the convoy close to Shileh Bridge killing 22 and injuring seven officials, the report said.
Among those injured in the attack was believed to be the governor of Zahedan, Hossein-Ali Nouri. The report said that he was shot five times and is in critical condition. The head of security of the Zahedan governorate also died in the attack.
The report quoted an “informed source” in a hospital in Zabol as saying that 50 individuals were killed or injured in the attack.
Sistan-va-Baluchistan Province is home to Baluchis, a predominantly Sunni Muslim ethnic minority. Iran has witnessed escalating unrest in recent months in areas populated by Baluchis, who complain of discriminatory and repressive policies by the Shiite clerics who rule the country.

Lisa Söderlindh

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 16 (IPS) - The total number of arrests following a gathering of hundreds of women's rights defenders who had made their way from Tehran's Daneshjoo Park to Laleh Park on Mar. 8 remains uncertain, as is the fate of those arrested by security forces, which reportedly used harsh tactics to disperse the peaceful demonstration.

According to Human Rights Watch, police dumped cans of garbage on the heads of women who were seated before charging into the group and beating them with batons to compel them to leave the park.

Mehri Amiri of the Society for Defence of Women's Rights in Iran reported that three women from her organisation had been released over the weekend, but that four others remained in the Evin Prison in Tehran. She said that many more are likely still being held but that her group cannot get in contact with any of them since the phone lines are being controlled by the government.

On the eve of International Women's Day, the Women Rights Association of Iran had prepared a resolution calling for an end to gender discrimination and demanding the social and legal rights of all Iranian women.

Under current Sharia laws, women are barred from running for president, lack equal rights to divorce, and after divorce can have custody of their children only up until the age of seven years, and "blood money" for a murdered woman is half that for a man.

Many of the women who handed out some 2,000 copies of the resolution were arrested "and unfortunately I think their verdicts will be execution", said Zolal Habibi of the U.S.-based group Women's Freedom Forum at a panel discussion here to assess the role of women in combating Islamic fundamentalism.

"Despite knowing what would happen to them, women came to the streets in commemoration of International Women's Day," said Habibi.

"And tens of thousands of great women have sacrificed their life for the ideal of equality and humanity," she continued. "But history has failed to acknowledge them because of the male-dominated culture we live in."

Following Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979, the monarchy was overthrown and an Islamic republic was created, in which religious clerics, headed by Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Khomeini, wielded ultimate political control.

Under Iran's current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who took office in August 2005, the pattern of abuses has not been alleviated, and "the human rights situation in Iran remains dire", notes Amnesty International in a February report on the country.

"For the last 27 years, Iran has been the only country that has had a fundamentalist regime in power, and which has actually turned its views and abuses into the laws of the country," said Habibi, pointing to harsh punishments such as stoning, a sentence that can be handed down for adultery.

"If you are able to escape from the hole when you are being stoned to death, you will be spared," Habibi said. "[But] while men are buried to their waist, women are buried to their neck."

Still, women have persisted in their fight for equality, Habibi said, recalling 13-year-old Fatemeh Mesbah, who was arrested when selling newspapers and executed the following day, in 1981; Mother Zakeri, executed at the age of 70 for supporting the Iranian Islamist opposition group, the People's Mujahedin of Iran; and Mujahedin leader Ashraf Rajavi, executed by the Iranian regime in 1982.

"Those are just some of the thousands of women who paid with their lives for their ideals," Habibi noted.

Since 1991, over 120,000 political opponents have been executed in Iran, according to the Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). A report compiled by Iranian human rights activists in commemoration of International Women's Day says that four women were executed this year, all under the age of 30.

Another 1,372 women have been arrested since the start of 2006, the group says. And according to Human Rights Watch, security forces have repeatedly resorted to violence to suppress peaceful gatherings.

"The list of people who have sacrificed their lives goes on and on, crossing all ages," said Habibi, "but the good thing is that women have not sat down and taken this, they are still standing up strong against the injustices."

Despite frequent crackdowns on public dissent by government security forces, the Mar. 8 women's day rally drew twice as many participants as last year, according to the non-profit news service Iran Focus.

Habibi said the gathering sent a clear message that the Iranian people are fed up with the regime, "and this resistance, coming from all directions, serves as pressure which will eventually build up to a complete regime change".

"This growing force of women in the resistance inspires women in Iranian society on a large scale to aspire to democratic change and transform them into major force to liberate Iran," said Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the Paris-based NCRI, in a speech presented as a video installation at the U.N. panel.

"The Iranian Resistance has the necessary political and social capacity to realise democratic change in Iran," she went on. "But the spirit that transforms these underlying potentials into reality is women's leadership."

The way to defeat Islamic fundamentalism is to "eliminate the male-dominated culture as an inhumane culture, through women's leadership", Rajavi noted. Because "the establishment of democracy without the active role of women in society's leadership is impossible".