France Says Iran Fabricated Charges Against Jews
PARIS, June 22 (Reuters) - French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine said
on Tuesday charges of spying against 13 Iranian Jews were fabricated and
part of an internal struggle among Iran's leadership.
"We can ascribe no credit to these accusations which were...presumably
fabricated after the arrests," Vedrine told the National Assembly
at question time.
"We fear that the explanation is...indeed that there is an internal
conflict," he said, adding that Paris was seeking to mobilise other
European nations in the case.
Vedrine said he had called in Iran's ambassador to make Paris' position
known.
Iran repeated on Tuesday it would not cave in to Western pressure to
release the 13 arrested as alleged Israeli spies.
Moise Cohen, president of the French synagogues' administration board,
said in a radio interview the arrests appeared to be part of manoeuvres
by Iranian hardliners to scuttle attempts by moderate President Mohammed
Khatami to open bridges to the outside world.
He said the 13 were mostly rabbis and religious employees from poor
Jewish communities in Iranian provincial cities. They included ritual butchers
and circumcisers, a graveyard guard and a 16-year-old boy, he said.
About 2,000 people demonstrated peacefully outside the Iranian embassy
in Paris at the call of French Jewish groups while a smaller number of
people marched in Marseille.
The Paris demonstrators chanted "We are all Iranian Jews."
Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said in Tehran the
detainees' religion had nothing to do with their arrest and Western pressure
would have no effect.
"This is an internal affair...They will be guaranteed justice as
suspects in other cases," the official IRNA news agency quoted him
as saying.
Conservative Iranian officials including judiciary chief Ayatollah Mohammad
Yazdi have spoken of the suspects, who were arrested several months ago,
as spies who deserved to hang.
Khatami, who has repeatedly pledged support for the rights of Iranian
religious minorities including Jews, has so far been silent on the case.
The pro-Khatami newspaper Neshat criticised conservatives for speaking
of the suspects as "spies" before they were tried.
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