Iran Claims an Oil Field It Seized/Iran Charges 12 at Prison Over Death of Protesters

Iran Claims an Oil Field It Seized
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and SA’AD AL-IZZI
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: December 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/world/middleeast/20iraq.html?hpw


BAGHDAD — The Iranian government said Saturday that an oil field that its troops occupied a day earlier was on its side of the border with Iraq, despite Iraqi claims to the contrary.

A group of about 11 Iranian soldiers seized a portion of the remote Fakka oil field in Maysan Province in southeastern Iraq early Friday, according to Iraq.

Government officials in Baghdad said they had summoned the Iranian ambassador to protest the military action, but diplomatic efforts had so far failed to resolve the dispute.

Ramin Mihman-Parast, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, denied on Saturday that Iranian soldiers were occupying an Iraqi oil field, said the Iranian state news agency.

But a statement attributed to Iran’s Armed Services Command took a harder line.

“Our forces are on our own soil, and based on the known international borders this well belongs to Iran,” the statement said, according to Iran’s state news agency.

Iraqi soldiers in the area said they had frequently had disputes with Iranian troops over the oil field, with each side replacing the other nation’s flag with its own every few weeks.

Iraq’s National Security Council issued a statement late Friday calling the occupation of the Fakka field a “breach of Iraqi sovereignty” and demanded that Iran remove the Iranian flag its soldiers raised above one of the field’s wells, known as Well No. 4.

“This well is inside Iraqi territory,” said Labeed Abawi, Iraq’s deputy foreign affairs minister.

Mr. Abawi said that sections of the long border between Iran and Iraq were unmarked, but that a technical committee consisting of representatives from each country had been seeking to resolve disputes when Iranian troops raided the field.

Also on Saturday, Iraq said 185 bodies of people who were probably killed during the late 1980s and early 1990s were found in a mass grave near Kirkuk in northern Iraq.

Duraid Adnan and Omar al-Jawoshy contributed reporting.






Iran Charges 12 at Prison Over Death of Protesters
By ROBERT F. WORTH
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: December 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/world/middleeast/20iran.html?ref=global-home


BEIRUT — The Iranian authorities acknowledged Saturday for the first time that at least three protesters had been beaten to death in prison after the disputed presidential election in June, as a military court announced that 12 prison officials had been charged with murder and other crimes.

The court’s statement followed months of denials by the police and prosecutors, who grudgingly conceded that some torture had taken place but attributed the deaths to meningitis or other illnesses. The statement was posted on the Web site of ISNA, a semiofficial news agency.

The statement represented a vindication for the Iranian opposition, whose leaders have long accused the government of covering up savage abuses during the postelection crackdown. Opposition leaders say at least 73 people are known to have been killed in the unrest. The government has given varying totals, from 17 to 30, including members of its own security forces.

Some in the opposition and abroad were skeptical that the charges would lead to justice.

“There is a history of these kinds of trials that are announced as a result of a P.R. fiasco, but then go nowhere,” said Abbas Milani, the director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a strong critic of Iran’s leadership.

The military court did not name the defendants.

The deaths provoked outrage among conservatives as well as reformists, especially after the son of a prominent conservative political figure, Mohsen Ruholamini, died after being tortured in detention. The controversy led to a parliamentary inquiry and pushed the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to personally order the closing of the Kahrizak prison in Tehran, where Mr. Ruholamini was tortured.

Opposition leaders also claimed that detainees were raped, citing detailed testimony from victims. The accusation was especially shocking in Iran’s Islamic culture and prompted angry rebuttals from conservatives.

The 12 people charged all worked at Kahrizak, according to the military court’s statement. Three are accused of murder, with a possible death penalty. They were charged in the killings of Mr. Ruholamini and two other jailed protesters: Amir Javadifar and Mohammad Kamrani.

The court said, “The coroner’s office rejected meningitis as the cause of death, confirming repeated beatings to the bodies, and concluded that those injuries were the cause of death.”

The charges against the other nine defendants include abuse, negligence and depriving prisoners of their legal rights, the court said. It made it clear that the abuses went far beyond the three killings, saying that the Kahrizak center “lacked necessary standards for housing detainees, and that beatings by the guards worsened this bad situation.”

The military court did not mention Ramin Pourandarjani, a young doctor who worked at Kahrizak and refused to sign death certificates he said were used to cover up murder there. Dr. Pourandarjani later testified to a parliamentary committee that jailers had tortured and raped prisoners, his family has said. He was found dead on Nov. 10, and government officials have given varying explanations, including suicide and poisoning.

The military court inherited responsibility for investigating the abuses in September, after a parliamentary committee suddenly announced that it would instead forward the matter to the court. Although the court is part of Iran’s armed forces, it is not known to have any link to the Revolutionary Guards, which orchestrated much of the crackdown after the election.

Although the Iranian authorities have never directly acknowledged that prisoners died from torture, the semiofficial Mehr news agency, citing “informed sources,” reported in late August that Iran’s chief medical examiner had determined that Mr. Ruholamini had died from beatings.

Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Toronto.