Ex-political prisoner set to be P.M.

Press, 11 August 1980, Page 6

Ex-political prisoner set to be P.M.

NZPA-Reuter .. Teheran Mohammad Ali Rajai, a former mathematics teacher with a first-hand knowledge of the late Shah’s jails, yesterday appeared set to become Iran’s first Prime Minister in nine months.

Mr Rajai, at present Education Minister and a parliamentary member from Teheran, was nominated in a brief letter addressed to deputies on Saturday by President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr. Parliament was expected to be formally notified yesterday, but no vote is expected before today at the earliest

Mr Rajai, who is 46, was not Mr Bani-Sadr’s first choice for the Prime Ministership, vacated when Mehdi Bazargan resigned last November after the. seizure .of the United State Embassy by Islamic militants, who are still holding 52 hostages. But? faced with the opposition of the Islamic Republican Party, the dominant group in the 270-seat House, the President had to settle for the candidate he found least objectionable politically. Islamic Republican Barty hard-liners last month rejected his first formal choice, the Deputy Interior. Minister • ; arid police chief, Mostafa Mir-

Salim, even though: he is a member of their party. If, as expected;-. Parliament endorses Mr Rajai, he will start choosing a Cabinet.; Mr Rajai spent two terms as a political prisoner under the Shah. He was released only a few months before?;. the Shah fell.- . A In Paris, Shapour Baktiar,. the last Prime Minister of Iran before the Islamic revolution, has announced from his exile home in Paris that he has established a resistance movement to fight the regime of Ayatollah Khomeiny. ; ; Mr Baktiar, in a statement issued from his Paris apartment, urged all Ira-nians-to. join his National Iranian Resistance Movement to.. save Iran from what be-called “the .handful of self-styled religionists, ignoramuses, illiterates, aliens in Iran, corrupt arid despotic people (who) have crushed 'lranian culture and civilisation.” . <.

Ayatollah Khomeiny has called on the Muslims of the world to rise against what he. called their own .corrupt governments and return to the path of the Holy Koran. Speaking to delegates attending an international congress in Teheran on freeing Jerusalem from Is-

raeli rule, -the Iranian leader said most of the Muslim world’s problems were caused by regimes obedient either to .the Soviet Union or the United States.

All the power of the “Soviet; Satan” had. not been able to- strangle Afghanistan, he said. He singled out the Egyptian President (Mr Anwar Sadat) and the Iraqi President (Mr Saddam Hussein) for attack, saying their Islam was the same as that of the ousted Shah of Iran and not that of the Koran. All of the 68 Iranians imprisoned in British jails after a protest on Monday outside the United States Embassy in London ended their hunger strike at the week-end and began taking food and water, a British Home Office spokesman has said.

The change of heart came after a 55 hour visit to Brixton orison, where a majority of the prisoners were, by . the Iranian charge d’affaires . in London, Dr Seyfollah Ehdaie.

Dr Ehdaie said later that the prisoners had given up their strike on condition that, he issue a statement condemning police behaviour towards them. No such statement was immediately issued.