Word: irna
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...week ago, Saturday's session at Tehran's Revolutionary Court focused on the British embassy's chief political analyst, Hossein Rassam; a local staff member of the French embassy, Nazak Afshar; and a 24-year-old French teacher, Clotilde Reisse, who was working and studying in Isfahan, according to IRNA, Iran's official news agency. In a vague and rambling indictment, the three were charged with espionage and "acting against the national security," and for inciting "riots." It went on to blame a litany of Western intelligence agencies, media organizations and software companies - including Israel's Mossad spy agency, Facebook...
...previous trial, confessions were recited. Rassam, the British embassy's most senior Iranian employee, admitted to his involvement in the plot, according to IRNA, one of the few state news agencies permitted to attend the closed proceedings. He said the embassy had a budget of $500,000 to finance opposition groups and political activists and that he personally contacted the office of thwarted presidential candidate and now leading opposition figure Mir-Hossein Mousavi in the run-up to the election. He also admitted that a local staffer wore green, the color of Mousavi's campaign, to one of the demonstrations...
Hard-line rhetoric heated up soon after the trials began. "Today's confession has opened the way to dealing with the leaders of the unrest," Hamid Resaee, a conservative lawmaker, told the state news agency IRNA. "There is no longer any reason to tolerate or compromise." Hard-line cleric Elias Naderan was even more explicit: "Those within the inner circle who managed the unrest must be put on trial. We shouldn't chase after weak, second-class figures with no influence...
...coup that brought down the democratically elected government after it nationalized Iran's oil, until then largely owned by British Petroleum. Understandably, many Iranians still see Britain as a credible culprit. In a piece titled "How Did England Mount the Green Wave?" the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) analyzed London's interference in Iran's elections based on "expert psychological opinion." The article, published on July 1, says British tactics included "mass distraction" and "hypodermic needle," both intended to subconsciously infuse Iranians with certain messages and goals. The British media pursued three phases, it said, the last of which...
...IRNA has accused prominent American and European media by name for "being at the service of instigators with their soft politics." Chastising the London Guardian newspaper for its reporting on Neda Agha Soltan - the 27-year-old woman whose death on video has made her an icon of Iran's protest movement - it says the paper failed to mention "evidence" by the Intelligence Ministry "which points to some foreign government's planning of this scenario." Ayatullah Ahmad Khatami, a conservative leader of Tehran's Friday Prayers, accused the protesters themselves of killing Neda: "Any intelligent person seeing the film gets...