TEHRAN, 31 January 2008 — A determined President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said yesterday that Tehran was nearing its target of producing nuclear energy and launched a new tirade against Israel as world powers seek to impose new sanctions on Iran. “We are moving toward the summit on the nuclear path,” he said in a speech in Bushehr, the site of Iran’s first nuclear power plant, which Tehran expects to be commissioned in October.
“Iranians ... will not back down one iota in defense of their rights,” Ahmadinejad told cheering crowds. Iran has been slapped with two sets of UN sanctions for its refusal to halt uranium enrichment and a third package is currently being considered by the Security Council.
But Ahmadinejad said: “The nuclear issue was the most important challenge since the (1979) revolution but with the help of God and your resistance, it is ending in favor of the Iranian nation.”
The West fears that Iran is using its nuclear drive to try to build atomic weapons, a charge Tehran has consistently denied, saying it is aimed at generating electricity.
Ahmadinejad also renewed his verbal attack on archfoe Israel, saying the days of the “filthy Zionist entity” were numbered. “I advise you to abandon the filthy Zionist entity which has reached the end of the line,” Ahmadinejad told world powers of the Jewish state which Tehran does not recognize. “It has lost its reason to be and will sooner or later fall,” he predicted.
Meanwhile, Iran’s judiciary chief has ordered a halt to public executions in the Islamic Republic unless they have his approval, his spokesman said yesterday. While those convicted of crimes like murder, drug smuggling and rape would still be hanged behind prison walls, the move by Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi-Shahroudi appeared designed to lower the public profile of an increasing number of executions in Iran.
European governments and Western rights groups have criticized Iran for the hangings, many of them in public, since authorities launched a clampdown on “immoral behavior” in July.
Some are hanged from cranes in public places. In one case, three drug smugglers were publicly put to death in the holy city of Qom, south of Tehran, on Jan. 2.
“Based on the order ... carrying out executions in public is only possible with the agreement of the judiciary chief and based on social necessities,” judiciary spokesman Alireza Jamshidi said in a statement.
