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Iranian regime arrests two German diplomats: state-run TV

AFP, Tehran, January 27, 2010  – Iran said Wednesday it arrested two German diplomats for allegedly having a hand in deadly anti-government protests which erupted on a Shiite Muslim holy day last month.


Two German diplomats using fictitious names of Yogi and Ingo were arrested” during the Shiite commemoration of Ashura, the state television website quoted an unnamed deputy intelligence minister as saying.


Yogi and Ingo were the two German diplomats whose role in the Ashura incidents has been established by the Islamic republic of Iran,” the official said in a separate ISNA news agency report.


The agencies did not specify whether the diplomats were still detained, as Berlin dismissed the reports which came as German industrial giant Siemens said it was quitting Iran over worsening diplomatic ties.


No German diplomats were arrested on December 27 last year,” German foreign ministry spokesman Andreas Peschke told a Berlin news conference.


If the accusations turn out to have been made, we reject them categorically,” Peschke said.


At least eight people were killed on December 27, when tens of thousands of opposition supporters protested against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in what turned into the bloodiest clashes since his disputed June 12 re-election.


Ahmadinejad’s victory triggered protests that shook the pillars of the Islamic republic, which in turn singled out Western powers for fomenting the unrest and expelled two British diplomats.


A few days after the Shiite commemoration, Iranian officials revealed they had detained a Swedish diplomat for 24 hours on December 27, the final day of the Ashura ceremonies.


And earlier this month Tehran’s chief prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said a German citizen was detained and later freed, apparently in connection with the Ashura riots.


In Wednesday’s reports, the deputy intelligence minister said Iran would “diplomatically protest to the German embassy in Tehran through the foreign ministry.”


The official alleged unidentified German diplomats set up a network of young Iranians to collect information on events in the country, adding members of this network had also been arrested.


This network was affiliated to the German intelligence service,” he said.


The riots… were pre-planned and the ’current of sedition’ (anti-government protest movement) and the network affiliated to Western intelligence services were involved,” he said on the official news agency IRNA.


A close adviser of main opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi was identified and arrested, and had “confessed that he was a spy,” he said.


Available evidence and this person’s confessions show that he was connected through a pointman to the intelligence service of a European country and was releasing confidential information.”


Meanwhile in Germany, Siemens said Wednesday it would stop signing new business deals in Iran from mid-2010 as tensions grew between Berlin and Tehran.


The board has decided not to conclude new contracts with commercial partners in Iran,” company spokesman Alexander Becker told AFP, adding a decision had already been taken to this effect last October.


The Iranian deputy minister said 1,000 people had been arrested during the Ashura riots, but did not specify whether these arrests were made only in Tehran or across Iran.


He said the arrested included 20 members of the exiled opposition movement, People’s Mujahedeen and they would be considered as mohareb (enemy of God), a charge if proves faces death penalty in Iran.


About 30 members of banned leftist Fadayean group were also arrested durin the riots posing as “mournful mothers,” but they were actually either “freed prisoners or relatives of people who had been previously executed.”


Mournful mothers” is a so-called group of women who have regularly demanded information on their children who have gone missing or killed in protests unleashed since June.


Around 14 members belonging to the Bahai group were also among those arrested, he said.

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