Iranian authorities have arrested four people they say were paid by a Kurdish militant based in Britain to carry out assassinations, state-run Press TV reported yesterday.
“Iran’s Intelligence Ministry says it has arrested four Britain-linked terrorists in the western city of Marivan, who carried out five assassinations in the last two years,” the English-language TV channel said on its Web site.
The report said the men were paid by a commander of Komala, an Iranian Kurdish group it described as a “terrorist” organization that it said had carried out assassinations in western Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
It said the men were all members of Komala and received weapons and cash on the Iran-Iraq border to carry out their attacks. It did not say who were their victims.
Kurds are an ethnic group with no state of their own who make up large minorities in Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria.
Iranian forces sometimes clash with Kurdish guerrillas who operate out of bases in northern Iraq.
The news came on the day Iranians commemorate the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran after the 1979 revolution which has come to symbolize the Islamic Republic’s resistance to what they see as Western aggression. The embassy building is referred to as the “Den of Espionage.”
The Press TV report played up the UK link, saying that Britain “funded and supported certain terrorist groups against the Islamic Republic.”
Unlike the US, Britain still has diplomatic relations with Iran.
The head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, John Sawers, said in a speech last week that “intelligence-led operations” were needed to prevent Iran getting a nuclear bomb, a comment interpreted in Tehran as proof that Britain was using subterfuge against the government.
‘DEATH TO AMERICA!’
Meanwhile, thousands of Iranians chanting “Death to America!” gathered yesterday outside the former US embassy in Tehran to mark the 31st anniversary of the capture of the mission by Islamist students.
Waving Iranian flags and carrying anti-US banners alongside posters of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the largely young crowd also shouted anti-Israel slogans.
State television showed a banner saying: “I will give my life for the leader [Khamenei],” while another quoted Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as saying: “If you want to shout, shout at the US.”
Iran annually on Nov. 4 marks the anniversary of the capture of the US embassy by Islamist students in Tehran in 1979, months after the Islamic revolution that toppled the US-backed shah.
The embassy in central Tehran has remained closed and the US and Iran have had no diplomatic ties since then.
The students, who took 52 US diplomats hostage and held them for 444 days, said they were responding to Washington’s refusal to hand over the deposed shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
However, over the past three decades, many Iranians who led the storming of the embassy have become severe critics of the regime they helped to establish.
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