US urges Japan to get tough on Iran

TOKYO (AFP) — Senior US officials on Wednesday urged Japan to follow Europe's example and take "strong measures" to punish Iran over its contentious nuclear programme.

Japan imposed sanctions against Iran on Tuesday in line with a UN resolution and said it plans to announce additional punitive measures later this month.

Robert Einhorn, State Department special adviser for non-proliferation and arms control, called for tough measures from Tokyo, which has long been on relatively good terms with Tehran.

"Japan imports a lot of oil from Iran, but the steps we are asking Japan to take would not interfere in any way with Japan's energy security, its imports of oil from Iran," he told a press conference.

He said he had told Japanese officials in an earlier meeting "to look at the measures already adopted by the European Union".

"These are strong measures. Japanese adoption of these strong measures would not adversely affect the economy of Japan," said the official, who earlier visited South Korea to rally support for tough sanctions.

The UN Security Council in June slapped its fourth set of sanctions on Iran over its refusal to halt its uranium enrichment work, part of a nuclear programme which many nations fear masks a drive for nuclear weapons.

The European Union last week announced additional sanctions, which have been opposed by Russia and China, now Iran's closest trading partner, with major energy interests in the country.

The EU measures include a ban on the sale of technology and services to Iran's energy sector, hitting activities in refining, liquefied natural gas, exploration and production, and a ban on investments in the energy sector.

Iran maintains that its nuclear programme is peaceful.

Daniel Glaser, a senior Treasury official overseeing efforts to combat terrorist financing and financial crimes, said US officials "look forward to (Japan's) next steps that go beyond its UN requirements".

On North Korea, Einhorn said he was unsure whether Pyongyang was ready to return to six-party talks aimed at stemming its nuclear ambitions, given its recent behaviour -- for example, the torpedoing of a South Korean warship, for which a multinational panel blamed the North.

"North Korea's actions raised legitimate questions in the minds of people about whether they are actually prepared to live up to their obligations to disarm completely, verifiable and irreversibly," he said.

"If the North Koreans are sincere... they have to take convincing tangible steps," Einhorn said.

He said those who had met North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il indicated he seemed to be "of sound mind" despite his apparent poor health.

"He seems to be talking and acting effectively," Einhorn said.

Iran’s account of woman’s crime shifting from adultery to murder

TEHRAN — Iran appears to be answering international criticism of its handling of the case of a woman sentenced to death by stoning by suggesting that she is guilty not only of adultery, but also of murder.

On Tuesday, in the first official response to the Brazilian president’s weekend offer of asylum for the woman, Sakineh Ashtiani, 43, an Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman said that the president had not been fully informed on the case and that “the details of the conviction of this individual” would render it “clear.”

The comment came after an earlier report by the conservative news service Jahan that stated, without citing any source, that Ms. Ashtiani had been convicted of the murder of her husband but that judges had not released that information to the press as the details of the killing were “too horrific.”

The same report has been published on several other Iranian news Web sites.

In 2006, Ms. Ashtiani received 99 lashes for having “illicit relations” with two men after her husband died Later that year, one of the men was convicted of the murder of her husband. Her case was revisited, and she was convicted of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning.

Last month, Iran’s judiciary postponed a final decision on her case, with a review apparently focused on whether she should be hung rather than stoned.

Over the weekend, President Lula Inácio Lula da Silva said that Brazil would grant the convicted woman a home in exile if she were “causing problems in Iran.” He had initially refused calls by human rights campaigners to use his cordial relations with the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to influence the case but appeared to change his mind while on a campaign visit in support of a woman, his former chief of staff, whom he has chosen to succeed him in Brazil’s next presidential election.

Iran has been criticized by human rights groups over its extensive use of the death penalty, as well as its adherence to strict Islamic laws which make adultery a capital crime.

Japan imposes sanctions on Iran over nuke program

TOKYO (AFP) - Japan imposed sanctions on Iran over its contentious nuclear program on Tuesday in line with a United Nations (UN) resolution and said it plans to announce additional punitive measures later this month. The cabinet of Prime Minister Naoto Kan announced the steps as the United States State Department’s special adviser for non-proliferation and arms control Robert Einhorn headed for Tokyo as part of an East Asian tour.

The measures include an asset freeze on 40 Iranian entities and one individual suspected of being involved in nuclear and missile development.

The UN Security Council in June slapped its fourth set of sanctions on Iran over its refusal to halt its uranium enrichment work, part of a nuclear program, which many nations fear masks a drive for nuclear weapons.

The US, European Union (EU), Canada and Australia have also announced additional sanctions, which have been opposed by Russia and China, now Iran’s closest trading partner, with major energy interests in the country.

Japan is also considering its own additional sanctions, the top government spokesman Yoshito Sengoku said.

“The government will push ahead with studying measures our country should take so that we will have a conclusion as soon as possible by the end of August,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Sengoku told a press conference.

“We believe we need to address the issue sternly to reach a diplomatic, peaceful solution,” he said.

European foreign ministers last week adopted measures targeting Iran’s oil and gas industries, going beyond the latest UN sanctions.

The EU measures include a ban on the sale of technology and services to Iran’s energy sector, hitting activities in refining, liquefied natural gas, exploration and production, and a ban on investments in the energy sector.

Iran maintains that its nuclear program is peaceful.

U.S. blacklists Iran military leaders, 21 firms

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Treasury blacklisted 21 state-owned Iranian companies as part of a growing and coordinated international effort to undercut Tehran's ability to use units in Europe and Asia to facilitate financial transactions and weapons development.

The Obama administration's point man in its financial war on Iran, Stuart Levey, also announced Tuesday U.S. sanctions against key leaders in Iran's elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well measures targeting Iranian foundations accused of supporting militant groups in Lebanon, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories.

"As its isolation from the international financial and commercial systems increases, the government of Iran will continue efforts to evade sanctions, including using government-owned entities around the world," said Mr. Levey, Treasury's undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. "Today's identifications will mitigate the risk that such entities pose."

Treasury's moves mark the latest in an escalating response from the U.S., its overseas allies, and the United Nations to Iran's continued pursuit of nuclear technologies. Tehran says it is seeking to develop civilian nuclear power, but the U.S. alleges Iran is covertly developing atomic weapons.

In June, the U.N. Security Council passed it fourth round of economic sanctions against Tehran aimed at curtailing its nuclear work. The U.S. Congress followed by passing extensive legislation targeting Iranian banks and energy companies. And the European Union last month banned any new investment in Tehran's oil- and gas-sector and significantly limited European companies' ability to do business with Iranian financial, insurance and transportation firms.

Mr. Levey said Tuesday that Iran has increasingly utilized foreign front companies to try to conduct financial transactions and facilitate Iran's development of military technologies as the sanctions have mounted.

Included on the new U.S. blacklist are nine Iranian companies based in Germany. Mr. Levey said Treasury notified Germany and all other countries affected by the sanctions ahead of the announcement.

A spokeswoman at the German embassy in Washington said her government is studying the new U.S. sanctions and stressed that Berlin has played a "leading role" in new EU sanctions passed last month.

The list also includes two companies in Belarus and one each in Japan and Italy. Some of these firms are owned by Iranian entities previously sanctioned by the Treasury, said Mr. Levey.

Onerbank ZAO of Belarus, for example, is owned by the previously designated Bank Saderat, according to the Treasury. Bank Torgovoy Kapital ZAO is owned by Iran's Bank Tejarat, it says.

U.S. individuals and companies are banned from conducting any business with the companies listed on the Treasury's Iranian Transactions Regulations list, which has now grown to 58. But Mr. Levey said the bigger impact is that foreign governments and firms will also be pressured to cease business with these Iranian companies for fear of running afoul of growing U.S. and U.N. sanctions.

"What we have found is that in many circumstances…the financial institutions will say they do not wish to do business with anyone identified on this list," said Mr. Levey, who noted that thousands of global firms are being notified of the new Treasury actions. "This allows us to take action and create a multilateral coalition to enforce it."

The Treasury on Tuesday also sanctioned four leaders of the Revolutionary Guards' Qods Force, which the U.S. believes oversees Tehran's financial support for militant groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Among those targeted were Hushang Allahdad, whom the Treasury says is the Qods Force's chief financial officer, and Gen. Hossein Musavi, believed to head the Qods Force's Ansar Corps, which is active in Afghanistan. The sanctions freeze any assets they might have in the U.S. and bans them from conducting U.S. dollar transactions. U.S. companies and business are also prevented from doing business with them.

The Treasury also sanctioned two Iranian-controlled foundations that the U.S. believes facilitates the flow of arms and money into Hezbollah's operations inside Lebanon. These include the Iranian Committee for the Reconstruction of Lebanon and the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee-Lebanon Branch.

The U.S. and its allies have made the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a principal target of its growing sanctions campaign. The EU last month banned all business dealings with the guard corps and the U.N. blacklisted a number of IRGC businesses, including the Khatam al-Anbiya business conglomerate.

Mr. Levey said the IRGC is increasingly dominating Iran's business sector and pushing out many smaller Iranian merchants and companies. "The Iranian people are becoming more and more victimized" by the IRGC, Mr. Levey said.

U.S. and European officials have said in recent weeks that they believe the international sanctions are having an increasing impact on Iran's ability to conduct business.

Last month, Khatam al-Anbiya pulled out of a major Iranian gas project citing the U.N. sanctions and the threat to its ability to raise financing. According to a European diplomat, more than a dozen of Tehran's cargo ships are stuck in Iranian ports due to the inability to secure overseas insurance. And some Iranian airplanes have been grounded recently due to their inability to meet European safety standards.

Senior Iranian diplomats in recent days have spoke of a renewed interest of engaging with the international community on the nuclear issue. Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki has cited September as a month that Tehran could meet with the U.S. and other involved parties.

U.S. officials, however, said they're only going to increase the financial pressure on Tehran in the coming weeks. Mr. Levey said he has a trip planned shortly to the Middle East aimed at better imposing the economic sanctions. And the State Department's point man on Iran and North Korea sanctions, Bob Einhorn, is visiting South Korea and Japan this week. Both Asian countries are major buyers of Iranian energy.

Brazil’s plea for asylum for Iranian facing stoning seems to fail

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

WASHINGTON — Iran’s conservative establishment appears to have reacted coldly to an entreaty by Brazil’s president to allow an Iranian woman convicted of adultery to take asylum in Brazil rather than face execution by stoning at home.

The reaction to the plea over the weekend by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva may introduce a strain into what has been an increasingly cordial relationship between Iran and Brazil. It also reinforced what critics of Iran view as a barbaric form of justice that is especially repressive toward women.

While no Iranian government officials commented on the Brazilian president’s plea, Jahan News, an ultraconservative news service in Iran that is regarded as credibly reflecting the government’s thinking, said Sunday that it was a “clear interference in Iran’s domestic affairs.”

Jahan also said that the Brazilian offer was made “under the influence of foreign media” and that the defendant, Sakineh Ashtiani, 43, might not be stoned to death because Iran’s judiciary was reviewing the lower court’s sentence. She could be hanged instead.

Ms. Ashtiani, 43, was convicted of an “illicit relationship” with two men. She denied the accusations during her trial.

Her case has attracted widespread attention on Iran’s record on human rights. The country is among the leading purveyors of capital punishment, and its strict Islamic laws make adultery a capital crime.

Mr. da Silva had initially rejected requests from rights advocates to use his influence with Iran to dissuade the authorities from executing Ms. Ashtiani, but he evidently had a change of heart during the weekend while he was campaigning in Brazil with for his former chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff. He has chosen Ms. Rousseff as his successor in the next presidential elections.

“If my friendship and affection for the president of Iran matters, and if this woman is causing problems there, we will welcome her here in Brazil,” Mr. da Silva said.

Meanwhile, the lawyer representing Ms. Ashtiani, Mohammad Mostafaei, appears to be in hiding after the arrest of his wife and brother-in-law.

According to Mr. Mostafaei’s own account, published on Saturday by the Iran Human Rights Activists News Agency, police officers questioned him at his office on July 24, then returned with a warrant for his arrest.

Finding him absent, the officers went to his home, where they arrested his wife and brother-in-law without giving a reason, Mr. Mostafaei wrote.

In his letter, Mr. Mostafaei appealed to Tehran’s chief prosecutor, Abbas Jafara-Dolatabadi, calling the detention of his family members “hostage taking” and an “abuse of power.”

Prisoner hanged in Iran

Tehran, Aug. 03 - Reza Mohajer, a prisoner in Gohardasht Prison in Karaj (west of Tehran), was hanged at dawn on Monday, after serving 11 years in prison, opposition websites reported.

He had been charged with murder. He was to be hanged on three previous occasions but each time was given a retrieve.

Past United Nations rapporteurs on the situation of human rights in Iran have confirmed that Iran executes many political prisoners on ordinary charges, such as murder or drug trafficking.

IAEA chief says Iran fuel swap talks could start soon

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Talks to revive a stalled plan for Iran to swap some nuclear material for fuel could start within months, the U.N. atomic watchdog chief said on Monday, and there had been some positive signals from the countries involved.

Iran backed out of a tentative plan brokered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and world powers in October under which it would ship 1.2 tonnes of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) abroad in return for medical reactor fuel.

Tehran showed revived interest in the deal in May after talks with Turkey and Brazil.

IAEA chief Yukiya Amano told Reuters on the sidelines of a lecture in Singapore he had received a "positive reaction" from countries in the "Vienna Group," comprising Russia, France, the United States and the IAEA, to hold a dialogue on a potential fuel swap soon.

"I am working on that. I have a positive reaction from member states ... and why not," Amano said, when asked if he intended to push for the talks to start in September.

Tehran and Washington also sent positive signals last week about the possibility of wider talks on the Iranian nuclear programme.

The original plan had been seen by the West as a way of divesting Iran of potential nuclear bomb material but officials say it has now lost some of its value because Iran's LEU stockpile has more than doubled in the meantime.

Iran has given an assurance that it would stop enriching uranium to 20 percent purity if world powers agreed to the fuel swap, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, told reporters in Istanbul last month.

The offer could bode well for an expected resumption of talks in September between Iran and major powers on the Islamic Republic's atomic program, which Tehran says is for peaceful purposes and not for bombs.

But Amano told the public lecture in Singapore that the talks might not yield a firm result.

"What will be the outcome, there may be not, I don't know. But starting a dialogue is very important... If we can have a discussion on this issue, that will be positive progress," he said.

The U.S. State Department said last week Iran had often sent mixed signals, but that Washington was "fully prepared" to resume talks among the six major powers and Tehran about its nuclear programme.

(Reporting by Nopporn Wong-Anan; Editing by Sylvia Westall and Miral Fahmy)

Iran opposition leaders lash out at powerful hardline cleric

TEHRAN (AFP) — Iranian opposition leaders lashed out on Monday at powerful hardline cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati over his accusations they had been paid by the United States to topple the Islamic regime.

Jannati, the long-serving head of the Guardians Council -- the constitutional and electoral watchdog -- is a vocal backer of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose re-election the opposition said was massively rigged.

Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi slammed Jannati for "lying, especially when one is tasked with fostering people's votes and the constitution," in comments carried by his Kaleme.com website.

"What better reason for fraud in the election than this man's recent lie?" charged Mousavi, a former premier who has led an anti-government campaign since losing to Ahmadinejad last year.

Jannati charged in comments published last week that Washington had paid one billion dollars to "the leaders of the sedition" -- a term hardliners coined to describe opposition leaders -- and promising them another 50 billion dollars to overthrow the regime.

The allegation has also drawn angry reactions from the other opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi and former president Mohammad Khatami as Ahmadinejad's re-election, which has bitterly divided the political elite, still figures as a major unresolved issue for the opposition.

"We are witnessing that they resort to lying, insults and defamation to justify oppression and bad policies," Khatami said on the website of his Baran organisation.

"Instead of preventing the country's downfall, they claim billion of dollars have come from abroad to undermine the revolution," said the reformist former president.

Karroubi for his part branded Jannati as "an accomplice to those who stole people's votes," in a statement on his website last week.

Jannati was recently re-instated in his position by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, despite widespread criticism against the council over the handling of the poll, whose result triggered widespread protests and unrest shaking the pillars of the Islamic republic.

Iranian leaders have accused the United States and Britain of masterminding the protests in a bid to topple the regime.

US backs Brazil asylum offer for Iran woman facing stoning

Philip Crowley

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The United States urged Iran Monday to accept an asylum offer from Brazil for a Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery.

"If Brazil is willing to accept... this woman, we would hope that Iran would consider that as a humanitarian gesture," State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said.

"And the fact that Brazil has stepped up and indicated a willingness to resolve it, we hope Iran will listen."

The comments came after Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Saturday offered asylum to Sakineh Mohammadi-Ashtiani, a 43-year-old Iranian mother of two.

She was sentenced to death by stoning after being convicted in 2006 of having an extramarital affair during the trial of her husband's alleged murderer.

Lula appealed to Iranian authorities and Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a close ally of Brazil.

Mohammadi-Ashtiani's sentence sparked an outcry in Western countries, and was temporarily suspended earlier this month by Iranian judiciary chief Sadeq Larijani.