TEHRAN, 28 July 2004 — Iran yesterday reiterated a strong warning to Israel over any plans to attack Iranian nuclear power plants, the local press reported. A commander of Iran’s paramilitary revolutionary guards was quoted as saying any attack would prompt harsh retaliation. Iranian forces would “annihilate Israel and the Zionist regime from the face of the Earth”.
The Iranian plants are located in the southern Gulf port of Bushehr and in Isfahan and Natanz in central Iran. The government of President Mohammad Khatami, however, believes that Israel would not launch any such attacks - but has nevertheless called the armed forces to be alert.
Iran also hit out yesterday at the US decision to grant protected status to the Iraq-based People’s Mujahedeen, the main Iranian armed opposition group, saying it proved Washington’s war on terrorism was a sham.
“The United States is using its fight against terrorism as a tool, and we knew from the beginning that this fight is void and they are not serious,” foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said, quoted by the official news agency IRNA.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Supreme Court has revoked a death sentence against a woman who killed an intelligence officer she says tried to rape her, her lawyer said yesterday. Afsaneh Norouzi was sentenced to death three years ago and has been in jail since 1997. The mother of three said she stabbed the man when he tried to assault her on the resort island of Kish in the Gulf.
“The Supreme Court has quashed the death sentence against Afsaneh Norouzi for some deficiencies in the case,” Norouzi’s lawyer, Abdolsamad Khorramshahi, told Reuters. He said the case would be sent back to a lower court in Kish, where her conviction was upheld after appeal in 2003, for a new sentence to be issued.
