TEHRAN, 29 March 2004 — Tehran’s mayor is threatening to erect a plaque denouncing Germany for supplying Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with chemical weapons if Berlin unveils one accusing Iran of a 1992 assassination, a report said yesterday.
The state news agency IRNA said Mahmoud Ahmadi Nejad sent a letter to his Berlin counterpart Klaus Wowereit, saying a district council’s plan for a plaque honoring four Iranian Kurds was “insulting.”
The Berlin Charlottenburg District council has plans to next month erect the plaque on the site of a restaurant where the dissidents were shot dead on Sept. 17, 1992. A German court concluded in 1997 that the killers acted on Tehran’s orders, prompting Berlin to recall its ambassador and the European Union to suspend its dialogue with the Islamic republic, which resumed only the following year.
The Berlin plaque would say the men died fighting for “freedom and human rights.”
But Nejad warned of likely tit-for-tat retaliation.
“Tehran Municipality is being pressured by the victims of chemical warfare and their families to install a panel listing names of the states which equipped Saddam Hussein’s toppled regime with chemical weapons, particularly Germany as its supporter and supplier.”
Meanwhile, inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) resumed work yesterday in Iran, IRNA news agency reported.
On its arrival in Teheran Saturday, the group immediately departed for Natanz, central Iran, to inspect the city’s nuclear site where Iran is allegedly carrying out uranium enrichment.
