TEHRAN, 13 October 2004 — Iran’s Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi called yesterday on the EU to help find a solution to the standoff between Tehran and the UN’s nuclear watchdog, but repeated a refusal to give up sensitive fuel cycle work. His comments followed a report that Washington was holding talks with its European allies on a possible deal to grant Tehran access to imported nuclear fuel and other incentives in return for a suspension of uranium enrichment activities.
“It is time that they took a step and presented proposals that respect our legitimate right to use civilian nuclear technology and that provide the necessary assurances that that we will not seek to build an atomic bomb,” Kharrazi said, quoted by the student news agency ISNA. But he cautioned that it was “wrong to think that (the Europeans) can, through negotiations, oblige Iran to give up its right to uranium enrichment”.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has told Iran to suspend its fuel cycle work related to uranium enrichment pending the completion of a probe of the Islamic republic’s nuclear activities. Depending on the level of purification, enriched uranium can be used either as fuel for a civilian reactor or as the explosive core of a nuclear bomb. Britain, France and Germany would like Iran to give up its work on the nuclear fuel cycle altogether as part of a “Libya-style” deal that rewards compliance with a host of incentives.
Meanwhile, the trial of two Iranian men accused of kidnapping, raping and murdering 20 people — most of them children — began in Tehran yesterday with the prosecutor and victims’ relatives demanding the death penalty. Mohammad Bijeh and his alleged accomplice, Ali Baghi, were arrested last month for the killing and raping of 17 children, two men and a woman in the desert south of Tehran.
According to Iranian media the two men were judged to be in their “full faculty”, meaning they could stand trial. The trial of the two men, who worked in a brickworks in Pakdasht, an impoverished town south of Tehran, is taking place behind closed doors due the horrific nature of the crimes, state television said.
If convicted, the pair face execution, and reports said the prosecutor and relatives of those killed yesterday called for “the harshest possible sentence”. The case has drawn huge media attention, with one reader writing to a newspaper asking for the alleged killers to be burned alive in a brick furnace.
The press has dubbed them “hyenas” or “vampires of the Tehran desert”, and President Mohammad Khatami has ordered his interior minister to personally investigate the case. Over a period of more than a year, the men allegedly lured children into the desert by saying they were going to dig out rabbits or foxes from their burrows.
They then allegedly stunned their victims with blows from a stone, sexually abused them and buried the bodies in shallow graves. They also allegedly placed dead animals near their victims’ bodies to cover up the smell of the rotting corpses.
