Top Iranians charged with exporting cash

Press, 21 December 1978, Page 8

Top Iranians charged with exporting cash

NZPA Teheran Iranian authorities have charged 100 people, including former Ministers, three generals, and the former Navy chief, with “illegal export of capital.” The charges, which also i included two nephews of i the Shah, come after the publication by striking Iranian Markazi Bank staff of a list of people alleged to have sent big sums abroad. Sums illegally exported were alleged to have totalled about 35,D00M rias (about SUSSOOM). In Paris, one of Iran’s most respected religious leaders, Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, said yesterday that he had been whipped, chained, and rendered virtually deaf during a recent spell of imprisonment in Iran. The weak-looking 56-year-old Shiite Muslim leader arrived in France on Tuesday and met the main anti-Shah religious leader, Ayatollah Ruhoilah Khomeiny.

Speaking to the domestic French news agency, Agence Centrale de Presse, Ayatollah Montazeri said: “In prison they damaged my hearing, chained me up for almost five months, whipped me, and left me bleeding for months.” “All these atrocities were the work of the Savak (the Iranian political police) and many of my compatriots, men and women, died under these conditions. The list of their names is well known,” he said.

Ayatollah Montazeri said other forms of torture in Iranian jails included forcing prisoners to carry heavy

weights and burning their bodies with electric rings. Many were deafened by beating on the head and blinded by warders poking fingers into their eyes, he said.

He was released from jail under a partial amnesty fori political prisoners on ber 30. He came to France partly to receive sophisticated medical treatment for ailments resulting from incarceration, informed sources say.

In Iran, troops have used tear-gas against anti-Shah demonstrators in the northwestern city of Tabriz, Radio Iran reports, as scattered protests against the embattled Iranian monarch continued.

Opposition sources say special commando units were rushed to Tabriz from Teheran after about a dozen soldiers laid down their arms and joined demonstrators in the streets.

The sources say the reinforcements were policing yesterday’s demonstrations —. one led by several hundred doctors and nurses protesting against an attack last week by pro-Shah groups led by soldiers on hospitals in the north-easter holy city of Mashhad, Accounts of Tuesday’s apparently-minor crac in army discipline in Tabriz remained confused, and the government made no reference to the demonstrations i except, to deny British ] Broadcasting Corporation I radio Persian-language reI ports of them and ,to say ! two persons had been injured.