Iran recount seen as bid to placate

EDITOR’S NOTE: Iranian authorities have barred journalists for international news organisations from reporting on the streets and ordered them to stay in their offices. This report is based on the accounts of witnesses reached in Iran and official statements carried on Iranian media.

In an attempt to placate protesters, Iran conducted a partial recount Monday of votes cast in its disputed presidential election, and the hard-line president asked for an investigation into the shooting death of a young woman who has become a potent symbol of the opposition’s struggle.The regime’s standoff with the West over its crackdown on demonstrators sharply escalated Sunday when Iran announced it had detained nine local employees of the British Embassy in Tehran. Both Britain and the European Union condemned what they called ‘harassment and intimidation.’Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hassan Qashqavi said five of the Iranian embassy staffers had been released and the remaining four were being interrogated.Intelligence Minister Gholam Hossein Mohseini Ejehi claimed he had videotape showing some of the employees mingling with protesters, and said the fate of those who remain in custody now rests with the court system in a country where supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s word is law. State television said the cleric-controlled judiciary appointed a team ‘to help clarify the fate of the detainees.’But Qashqavi played down the dispute, saying officials were in written and verbal contact with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and Iran had dismissed the idea of downgrading relations. Last week, Iran expelled two British diplomats after accusing the country of meddling, and Britain responded in kind.’Reduction of diplomatic ties is not on our agenda for any country, including Britain,’ Qashqavi said.President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, asked a top judge yesterday to investigate the killing of Neda Agha Soltan, who became an icon of Iran’s ragtag opposition after gruesome video of her bleeding to death on a Tehran street was circulated worldwide.Ahmadinejad’s Web site said Soltan was slain by ‘unknown agents and in a suspicious’ way, convincing him that ‘enemies of the nation’ were responsible.The regime has implicated protesters and even foreign intelligence agents in Soltan’s death. But an Iranian doctor who said he tried to save her told the BBC last week she apparently was shot by a member of the volunteer Basij militia. Protesters spotted an armed member of the militia on a motorcycle, and stopped and disarmed him, Dr Arash Hejazi said.Authorities have cracked down hard on dissent, most recently on Sunday, when riot police clashed with up to 3000 protesters near the Ghoba Mosque in north Tehran. It was Iran’s first major post-election unrest in four days.- Nampa-AP