Last Updated: Thursday, 30 June, 2005, 15:11 GMT 16:11 UK

Iran victor 'kidnap role' probe

The president denies being among the hostage-takers
The US says it is examining reports that Iranian President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took part in the 1979 hostage-taking at Tehran's US embassy.
Some of the former US hostages have said they recognise Mr Ahmadinejad as one of their captors.

But three Iranians involved in the action, as well as Mr Ahmadinejad's own staff, have denied that he took part.

Mohsen Mirdamadi, the hostage-takers' leader, told the BBC that the new president had not been there.
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TEHRAN, Iran --Iran's supreme leader on Sunday appointed a former captor in the 1979 hostage crisis as the head of state-run radio and television.

Conservative Ezzatollah Zarghami, 45, was promoted by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from his post as deputy head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting.

Paris, Jun. 29 – A principal French daily reported that newly-elected Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in charge of security at the United States embassy in Tehran after he and fellow radical students loyal to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took over the compound by force in November 1979.

Libération wrote that Ahmadinejad was a member of Students Following the Line of the Imam [Khomeini] and a leader of the hostage-takers who held American diplomats and embassy staff for 444 days.

London, Jun. 29 – A veteran British journalist said that he had interviewed the newly-elected Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in 1979, when he was a leading activist who took over the United States embassy in Tehran, holding American diplomats hostage for 444 days.

The BBC’s world affairs editor John Simpson wrote in an article posted on Monday on the British broadcasting giant’s website, “Ahmadinejad was a founder of the group of young activists who swarmed over the embassy wall and held the diplomats and embassy workers hostage for 444 days”.

Prior to the presidential elections, Iran Focus wrote Ahmadinejad’s biography revealing that the former Revolutionary Guards commander became a member of the Office for Strengthening Unity following the 1979 Islamic revolution and later on planned and participated in the storming of the U.S. embassy compound.

Simpson said that as soon as he saw a picture of Ahmadinejad, he knew there was something faintly familiar about him and later reading the state-run English-language daily Tehran Times he realised that he had recorded an interview with him and other hostage-takers after the siege was over.

By John Simpson
BBC world affairs editor

As soon as I saw a picture of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's new president, I knew there was something faintly familiar about him.

And it was not because he was mayor of Tehran, because, like many other Western journalists, I have been barred from visiting Iran in recent years.

Then, when I read a profile of him in the English-language Tehran Times, I realised where I must have seen him: in the former American embassy in Tehran.

Ahmadinejad was a founder of the group of young activists who swarmed over the embassy wall and held the diplomats and embassy workers hostage for 444 days.

Somewhere in the BBC archives is the interview I recorded with him and his colleagues, long after the siege was over. They all seemed rather similar - quiet, polite, but with a burning zeal.

And now, contrary to almost every expectation except his own, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been elected president.

Student activists in Elm-o Sanaat University at the time of the Iranian revolution were dominated by ultra-conservative Islamic fundamentalists. Ahmadinejad soon became one of their leaders and founded the Islamic Students Association in that university after the fall of the Shah’s regime.

In 1979, he became the representative of Elm-o Sanaat students in the Office for Strengthening of Unity Between Universities and Theological Seminaries, which later became known as the OSU. The OSU was set up by Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, who was at the time Khomeini’s top confidant and a key figure in the clerical leadership. Beheshti wanted the OSU to organise Islamist students to counter the rapidly rising influence of the opposition Mojahedin-e Khalq (MeK) among university students.

The OSU played a central role in the seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran in November 1979. Members of the OSU central council, who included Ahmadinejad as well as Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, Mohsen (Mahmoud) Mirdamadi, Mohsen Kadivar, Mohsen Aghajari, and Abbas Abdi, were regularly received by Khomeini himself.

According to other OSU officials, when the idea of storming the U.S. embassy in Tehran was raised in the OSU central committee by Mirdamadi and Abdi, Ahmadinejad suggested storming the Soviet embassy at the same time. A decade later, most OSU leaders re-grouped around Khatami but Ahmadinejad remained loyal to the ultra-conservatives.

During the crackdown on universities in 1980, which Khomeini called the “Islamic Cultural Revolution”, Ahmadinejad and the OSU played a critical role in purging dissident lecturers and students many of whom were arrested and later executed. Universities remained closed for three years and Ahmadinejad joined the Revolutionary Guards.

In the early 1980s, Ahmadinejad worked in the “Internal Security” department of the IRGC and earned notoriety as a ruthless interrogator and torturer. According to the state-run website Baztab, allies of outgoing President Mohammad Khatami have revealed that Ahmadinejad worked for some time as an executioner in the notorious Evin Prison, where thousands of political prisoners were executed in the bloody purges of the 1980s.

In 1986, Ahmadinejad became a senior officer in the Special Brigade of the Revolutionary Guards and was stationed in Ramazan Garrison near Kermanshah in western Iran. Ramazan Garrison was the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards’ “extra-territorial operations”, a euphemism for terrorist attacks beyond Iran’s borders.

In Kermanshah, Ahmadinejad became involved in the clerical regime’s terrorist operations abroad and led many “extra-territorial operations of the IRGC”. With the formation of the elite Qods (Jerusalem) Force of the IRGC, Ahmadinejad became one of its senior commanders. He was the mastermind of a series of assassinations in the Middle East and Europe, including the assassination of Iranian Kurdish leader Abdorrahman Qassemlou, who was shot dead by senior officers of the Revolutionary Guards in a Vienna flat in July 1989. Ahmadinejad was a key planner of the attack, according to sources in the Revolutionary Guards.