Khamenei-linked Iranian daily resists court order to return confiscated land

“We pursue and advance our national issues and interests independently of the United States,” said Alaeddin Boroujerdi, a member of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee.

“Therefore, it is essential to strengthen our relations with major countries like China and Russia, as well as with our neighboring countries,” Boroujerdi told ISNA news agency.

Khamenei said on Friday that talks with Washington are "neither wise, intelligent nor honorable."

He also said that US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal under President Donald Trump shows Washington is unreliable.

“The Islamic Republic trusted America once, despite the Supreme Leader’s clear distrust. The Americans, however, failed to honor their commitments, even tearing up an agreement backed by a UN resolution,” Boroujerdi added.

He also said Iran’s policies must reflect reciprocity, warning that threats to Iranian national security would be met with countermeasures.

The remarks indicate that hardliners are coalescing around the intransigent take of the Supreme Leader on talks, in opposition to the public desire for talks mooted by the relatively moderate government.

While Iran’s leadership frames its anti-US approach as protecting national sovereignty, the economic toll of sanctions and isolation has taken a heavy toll.

Ordinary Iranians are confronted with worsening standards of living as the US dollar is being exchanged at over 890,000 rials on Saturday, a new record low. Inflation, unemployment, and shortages in critical sectors continue to strain daily life.

Hadi Matar, a 27-year-old American whose parents are of Lebanese Shi'ite extraction, pleaded not guilty to second-degree attempted murder and assault.

Jurors in the Mayville, New York courtroom have heard the prosecutor's opening statements on how the knife attack at a 2022 New York lecture unfolded in a matter of seconds, leaving Rushdie blinded in one eye and fighting for his life in hospital.

Moments before 77-year-old Rushdie was stabbed on stage, a poet was introducing the book event on the topic of keeping writers safe from harm, Chautauqua District Attorney Jason Schmidt told the jury according to Reuters.

The defendant is accused of running on stage and stabbing Rushdie up to 10 times. The attack also damaged Rushdie’s liver and paralyzed one hand.

Matar’s defense team has questioned the neutrality of police officers’ testimony.

Lynn Schaffer, an assistant public defender here in Chautauqua County, opened her remarks by saying it was an honor to defend Matar and argued that the case and sequence of events is not straightforward, a BBC journalist attending the trial said.

Matar’s lead defense lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, was absent due to illness.

Who is Hadi Matar?

In July 2024, two years after the incident, an unsealed indictment charged the defendant with providing material support to Iran-backed Hezbollah, sometime between September 2022 and August 2022.

The indictment did not specify how Matar is linked to the group.

In an interview with the Daily Mail, Matar's mother told the outlet that her son went on a month-long trip to the Middle East in 2018 and came back radicalized.

Rushdie was forced to spend about 10 years in hiding throughout the United Kingdom and United States for much of the 90s after Khomeini issued a fatwa or religious edict to kill the author.

Khomeini called on “the proud Muslim people of the world” to kill the author of “The Satanic Verses,” which centered on the life of the Prophet Mohammad.

The trial is expected to last up to 10 days, the Associated Press reported.

Rushdie who released a memoir after the attacked called Knife, is expected to take the stand and come face-to-face with his would-be murderer later in the trial.

The protest points to smoldering discontent even after authorities quashed by force a nationwide protest movement against clerical rule which began in 2022.

At the central clocktower square in the city of Yasuj, a young woman who appeared to be in her late 20s removed her headscarf and outer layer of clothes in the midst of a crowd according to the eyewitness, who declined to be identified for security reasons.

Dressed in a tank top and trousers, she chanted “Death to the dictator!” the source added. The slogan is a common refrain among dissidents against 85-year-old Supreme Leader and theocrat Ali Khamenei.

Iran International later obtained a video showing the woman chanting "Long Live the King".

Security forces promptly descended on the woman, wrapping her in a blanket and forcibly bundling her into a departing car.

A source, speaking to Iran International on condition of anonymity for security reasons, said two men were also arrested after attempting to defend her during the arrest.

The Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran was sparked by the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in September 2022 while in police custody over hijab violations.

Hardliners have intensified efforts to enforce strict dress codes for women even as a new law on hijab enforcement appears to have lapsed and Javad Zarif, a relative moderate Iranian vice president, said the government aimed not to pressure women.

Despite the official statements and widespread public defiance, government measures to reinforce mandatory hijab laws have persisted, resulting in the closure of businesses and the impoundment of vehicles associated with hijab offenses.

The violent seizure of the eleven Baha’i women follows the October sentencing of ten Baha’i women in Isfahan to a total of 90 years in prison.

“Two days before the United Nations reviews Iran’s human rights record, it commits yet another senseless act against women who are completely innocent. Their so-called 'crime' was to serve their local communities, and now the Iranian government has detained them in violent home raids,” said Simin Fahandej, Representative of the Baha’i International Community to the United Nations in Geneva.

Iran International obtained a January 30 letter from Behrouz Asadi, the head of the Democratic Forum of Iranians in Mainz, to Freiburg’s mayor Martin Horn.

Asadi wrote “The municipal administration in Isfahan has actively cooperated with the security and intelligence forces to repress the Baha'is .” Asadi added that “You are setting an example that you are tolerating and overlooking the regime’s course of action and the human rights violations that are taking place there.”

Horn did not respond to requests by Iran International for comment. Freiburg is the only German city that has a twin city partnership with an Iranian city.

The German city of Weimar ended its attempted partnership with Shiraz in 2010 because Iranian officials on a trip to Germany refused to visit the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial in Weimar.

Freiburg launched its partnership with Isfahan in 2000.

Dr. Wahied Wahdat-Hagh, a German-Iranian political scientist, criticized Freiburg's partnership with Isfahan as hypocritical.

Iran, he said, has been oppressing women, crushing secular opposition, persecuting religious minorities and carrying out one of the highest execution rates globally.

“No one wanted to acknowledge at the time that Iran had already been a totalitarian dictatorship.”

Wahdat-Hagh, who is a Baha'i, is one of the world’s leading experts on the Baha'is in Iran. “The Freiburg Initiative did not want to know that Iran has wanted to destroy Israel since 1979 and had waged a war against Israel with the help of its proxies,” he added.

Assadi also noted in his letter to Horn that “Your partner city Isfahan is one of the places where the regime produces rockets, drones and bombs.” He noted that “the partnership is a status symbol of the regime with which it attempts to publicly whitewash its crimes.”

Iran’s military fired projectiles from Isfahan into Israel last year.

Michael Blume, the state commissioner tasked with fighting antisemitism, including Iranian government Holocaust denial, in the state of Baden-Württemberg, where Freiburg is located, has lashed out at Iranian dissidents opposed to Ali Khamenei’s government and has not called on Horn to end the partnership. Blume called Iranian dissidents “corrupt exiled nationalists.”

Ronai Chaker, a prominent activist from Germany’s Yazidi community who combats Islamism in the federal republic, told Iran International ”I find Freiburg's twin city partnership with Isfahan to be a scandalous betrayal of the values ​​of democracy, human rights and Germany's historical responsibility toward the Jewish people."

"The systematic persecution of Baha'is, women, LGBTQ+ people and dissidents there is a clear human rights violation.”

In 2017, the Iranian authorities arrested more than 30 men suspected of being homosexuals at a private party last week in the Isfahan province.

Chaker said “The city of Freiburg must end this partnership immediately. Anyone who continues to cling to the relationship with Isfahan is complicit in the crimes of the mullahs' regime.”

She also took Blume to task for his reported enabling of the partnership. “Due to his silence and his lack of a critical attitude towards this twin city partnership, Blume has lost all credibility as an antisemitism representative. His resignation would be a logical step. Freiburg must clearly distance itself from Isfahan instead of giving the Iranian regime legitimacy through such partnerships.”

The Iranian dissident Sheina Vojoudi, who lives in Germany, previously said “Blume called people like me ‘corrupt exiled nationalists’ after I showed him leaked footage of Evin prison.”

Blume has refused to comment.

Pezhman Soltani, 32, was convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to death under qisas, retribution-in-kind, which allows the victim’s family to demand execution under Islamic law, KHRN said.

Two other men, Rizgar Beygzadeh Baba-Miri, 47, and Ali Soran Ghassemi, 28, were sentenced to 15 years and 10 years and one day in prison, respectively, for "complicity in murder." A fourth defendant, Kaveh Salehi, 42, was acquitted.

The verdicts were issued in December last year by a criminal court in Iran's West Azerbaijan Province and delivered to the defendants in prison on January 15, KHRN added.

A separate case against the four men and a fifth prisoner, Javanmard Mam-Khosravi, remains open at the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Orumiyeh in northwestern Iran on charges including enmity against God or moharebeh, armed insurrection or baghi and collaboration with hostile states.

KHRN said the case has been delayed due to complaints by the men that Ministry of Intelligence interrogators used torture to extract forced confessions.

On July 14, 2024, the IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News Agency broadcast what KHRN described as forced confessions from four of the prisoners.

The group said the men had been subjected to months of physical and psychological torture at an intelligence detention center in Orumiyeh before being moved to Orumiyeh Central Prison. During this time, they were denied access to lawyers and family visits.

The five were arrested in April and May 2023 after taking part in the nationwide protests in Bukan, West Azerbaijan Province, and Baneh, Kurdistan Province.

Last December, Amnesty International warned that at least 10 individuals in Iran remain on death row in connection with the Woman, Life, Freedom protests of 2022 sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini over an alleged hijab law violation.

The rights group said Iranian authorities had arbitrarily executed 10 others after "grossly unfair sham trials" and subjected many detainees to torture, including beatings, electric shocks, and sexual violence.

Amnesty raised concerns over further executions amid what it described as an "ongoing execution spree."