DUSHANBE/TEHRAN: Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev has asked Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to continue dialogue on the Iranian nuclear issue, Medvedev’s spokeswoman said yesterday.
At Medvedev’s initiative, the two leaders discussed the Iranian nuclear program in Tajikistan’s capital, Dushanbe, where they were attending a Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting.
“The Russian president raised the possibility of continuing the dialogue and the discussion,” Medvedev’s spokeswoman, Natalia Timakova, told reporters without giving further details.
Western powers fear Tehran wants to build an atomic bomb but Iran says it is developing nuclear technology only to generate electricity. Washington has been pressing for tighter sanctions against Tehran at the United Nations Security Council in New York and needs Moscow’s support as a veto-wielding member of the Council, despite the heightened tension caused by the Georgian conflict.
Meanwhile, four men and one woman have been hanged in a Tehran jail for murder, with two others given a reprieve, a newspaper reported yesterday, the latest in a series of hangings that have drawn criticism from rights groups.
The five were hanged on Wednesday in Tehran’s Evin prison, the state newspaper Iran reported. It said one of those executed had killed a five-year-old boy while robbing his home. The woman was executed for killing her husband after discovering he wanted to marry another woman.
Two others due to be executed were reprieved. One has a stay of execution after killing a woman he was to marry and her lover. He has two months to seek forgiveness from the family, who can accept so-called ‘blood money’ for sparing him.
