The Latest from Iran (14 October): The Plot and Beyond

See also Iran 6-Point Analysis: Obama and the Regime Walk Tightropes Over the Plot

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Manssor Arbabsiar1755 GMT: Parliament Watch. A sharp extract from the resignation letter of MP Ali Motahari, who is leaving Parliament because of its failure to interrogate the President, "The Supreme Leader's interference in Majlis matters is not advisable."

1748 GMT: Bank Fraud Watch. Mehr names three more companies, all in Qazvin Province, in the $2.6 billion bank fraud: Setaregan Amir Mansour, Tejarat Gostar, and Amir Mansour Iranian.

1448 GMT: CyberWatch. News from Iran's triumphant cyber-campaign....

Gholamreza Jalali, the military's head of "passive defence", has said that Facebook must be filtered, as Iran creates a Basij social network with 10 million blogs.

The Ministry of Culture and the Centre for Cyber Development has agreed on the launch of cultural cyber-centres in 20 countries, while Minister of Communications Reza Taghipour has said Iran will create a "clean Internet" to replace the current liberal one of the West.

1438 GMT: Reassurance of the Day. The Supreme Leader, meeting paramilitary Basij in Kermanshah, has said that Iran aims to mobilise 10 million Basij, the "prestigious offspring of the Revolution".

Ayatollah Khamenei added that, as Basij are active not only in military activities but also science and progress, 10 million of them does not mean militarisation of society but "preparedness".

1435 GMT: Economy Watch. Mohammad Attarian, of the High Council of Employment, has said unemployment will reach 20% at end of year, if refunds covering subsidy cuts are not paid to producers.

1425 GMT: Health Watch. The head of the Medical Council of Iran, Shahabeddin Sadr, has announced that healthcare costs have increased by 20 to 40% after subsidy cuts. with rising energy costs at hospitals and drug and medical equipment factories.

Minister of Health Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi said Sunday that 2.5 million people in Tehran are facing “disastrous” medical costs. She added that, according to the government’s 5th Development Plan, households should only pay for 30% of the medical services they receive, but they are currently paying 53.9% of the costs.

1419 GMT: Your Tehran Friday Prayer Update. Looks like the star of today's Friday Prayer was not Hojetoleslam Seddiqi, but the audience, who shouted "Death to looters!" as they left,having applauded Seddiqi for condemning the $2.6 billion bank fraud.

Seddiqi declared that Iran's executive, Parliamentary, and judicial powers, with people's help, should cut off the hands of traitors in public office,

1415 GMT: Political Prisoner Watch. Back from an academic break to find the testimony of Naim Sobhani about the detention since June of his father Riaz Sobhani, a Baha’i held on the charge of providing financial assistance to the Baha’i University in Iran.

According to his son, Riaz Sobhani, who is 68, accepted the charge at his trial on 1 October: "I did not commit a crime. I just helped the young students who are not permitted to get an education by the Government,".

Riaz Sobhani’s first lawyer, Abdolfattah Soltani, was arrested shortly after accepting his case, and his family was forced to choose other lawyers for him.

0845 GMT: Remembering the Dead. A "Green Martyrs Database", Sorkhe Sabz, is now on-line with news and a list of 138 people who have been killed since the 2009 Presidential election.

0840 GMT: The House Arrests. Ayande, rejecting rumours that detained opposition figure Mir Hossein Mousavi has cancer, claims he met his family on Wednesday.

Mousavi, his wife Zahra Rahnavard, and Mehdi and Fatemeh Karroubi have been under strict house arrest for eight months.

The story is accompanied by an undated photograph of Mousavi and Rahnavard.

0835 GMT: Sanctions Watch. A US Treasury official has said Iran is facing a projected loss of $14 billion a year in oil revenue as a result of economic sanction.

David Cohen, the Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, told a COngressional committee, “Iran has been increasingly unable to attract foreign investment, especially in its oil fields, leading to a projected loss of $14 billion a year in oil revenues through 2016.....Iran’s shrinking access to financial services and trade finance has made it extremely difficult for Iran to pay for imports and receive payment for exports.”

Wendy Sherman, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, told the Senate Banking Committee that firms such as Russia’s OAO Lukoil, India’s Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL), the Netherland’s Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA), and Turkey’s Tupras Turkiye Petrol Rafinerileri AS (TUPRS), have stopped sales of refined petroleum products to Iran.

Last week Iranian authorities suspended cooperation with Russia's Gazprom on a major oilfield development because of lack of progress.

0828 GMT: Protest Watch. The conservative Ahlulbayt news agency reports demonstrations in the holy city of Qom on Tuesday after police officers allegedly beat a young cleric.

“A group of clerics and youth” protested in front of a police station. According to reports, the cleric had not been carrying his motorcycle registration: “Astonishingly,” the news agency wrote, "[the police officer] used a baton against the student which led to head injuries.” The article continued, “All the onlookers admitted that the motorcyclist had acted against the law and did not have his document with him...but tear gas and batons should not be the penalty for such offences.”

Ahlulbayt warned Iranian authorities that a repeat of such incidents might trigger events similar to the uprising in Tunisia that toppled the Ben Ali regime: “Let’s remember that the almost a year ago, a young man who had had enough of the police’s severe conduct, set himself on fire and inflamed the world.”

0823 GMT: Bank Fraud Watch. Farshad Heydari, the new head of Bank Melli, has apologised to the people and the Supreme Leader for irregularities in the bank system and asked the judiciary to prosecute those responsible.

Heydari's predecessor, Mahmoud Reza Khavari, has reportedly fled to Canada amidst allegations of neglect and responsibility for the $2.6 billion bank fraud.

0820 GMT: The Plot. Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, the Iranian Foreign Ministry's official supervising Arabia and Africa, has met the Saudi Ambassador and told him, "The US allegation of a plot is a fake."

0810 GMT: Sanctions Watch. The British Foreign Office, under the headline "Human Rights Violators", has posted the names and photographs of 29 Iranian officials sanctioned this week by the European Union.

Those named include Minister of Intelligence Heydar Moslehi, Minister of Culture Mohammad Hosseini, and Yadollah Javani, the head of the Political Bureau of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

0620 GMT: Economy Watch. MP Emad Hosseini has claimed that, for more than five months, the Government has lacked the funds to make support payments to cover price increases from its subsidy cuts programme. Hosseini adds the assertion, which we heard this summer, that 1.6 million families have not paid their gas bills.

MP Musalreza Servati said Parliament has given up asking about the deficit in the subsidy cuts budget, as it has received no report from staff.

0600 GMT: We begin this morning with a 6-point analysis by Scott Lucas of the latest US strategy, embodied in the statement by President Obama yesterday, to turn the alleged plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador into political and economic pressure on the Iranian regime.

At a hearing before a Senate committee, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman said that calls had been made "to every single capital in the world" by President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon, Deputy Secretary of State William Burns, Sherman herself, and every Assistant Secretary in the State Department to tighten sanctions and raise pressure on Iran.

Sherman said, "We have encouraged them to make sure that the Quds Force [of the Revolutionary Guards] stops doing business in their countries, to look at high-level visits that might be coming from Iranians to their country, and to consider, let's say, postponing, if not cancelling outright, those visits."

Meanwhile, as Obama was taking the offensive against Tehran --- "Even if at the highest levels there was not detailed operational knowledge, there has to be accountability" --- his officials were having to do some defending.

Unnamed US officials told journalists how Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar, at the centre of the attempt to get a Mexican drug gang to kill the Saudi Ambassador, was introduced to the supposed link to that gang, who just happened to be an undercover informant for US agencies.

The two officials said Arbabsiar was put in contact the informant by a woman he met as a Texas used-car dealer. After a trip to Iran, he allegedly approached the woman earlier this year and asked her to introduce him to anyone who "knew explosives". She supposedly arranged for Arbabsiar to get in touch with her nephew, not knowing that he was an informant. 

This is not "the latest curious twist" in the story, as Reuters labels it, but an attempt by the Obama Administration at damage control. Since the revelation of The Plot, observers have been asking how Arbabsiar could have approach a man who just happened to be feeding information to American agencies. One theory is that US officials, having already established Arbabsiar's intentions on his return from Iran, led him --- unsuspecting of the Government's knowledge --- to the informant.

Not sure that this supposed revelation works, however, to safeguard the US story of high-level Iranian involvement in The Plot. Reuters expresses scepticism:

It became increasingly clear that if Iran's Quds Force, the covert arm of its Islamic Revolutionary Guards, had sought to strike U.S. targets, their alleged agent was hapless.

"If they're looking for 007, they got Mr. Bean," said David Tomscha, a friend and former business partner of Arbabsiar's in Corpus Christi, Texas, where they ran a used-car dealership together a decade ago.