Iran news in brief, 19 February 2015

South African Man Sentenced To 1,500 Prison Term for 29 Rapes

JOHANNESBURG – A South African court has sentenced a serial rapist to 1,535 years in prison for sexually assaulting 29 women over a period of six years, the local daily, The Times, reported Friday.

Albert Morake, who committed his crimes between 2007 and 2013, was sentenced to 30 life sentences and was convicted of 144 additional charges including robbery, kidnapping and attempted murder.

“He had acted with premeditation. He came prepared (to commit the crimes) and was always in control,” Judge Rean Strydom said during sentencing.

Authorities said Morake threatened the women with a gun and sometimes tied up the partners of his victims and forced them to witness the rapes.

Strydom said that Morake, who showed no remorse for his actions, behaved arrogantly and “provided his victims with advice on how to protect themselves from rape in the future.”

According to South African law, Morake will not be eligible for parole before serving at least 25 years behind bars.

Argentine Government, Opposition Feud after Memorial March for Nisman

BUENOS AIRES – A day after an estimated 400,000 people marched in Buenos Aires to honor late prosecutor Alberto Nisman, the Argentine government criticized the political tone of an event one opposition leader described as a “resounding demonstration of hope.”

What took place Wednesday in Buenos Aires was not “a demonstration from the point of view of paying tribute to anybody, but rather an opposition march,” presidential chief of staff Anibal Fernandez said.

Citing the “strongly aggressive” statements some participants made against President Cristina Fernandez, Cabinet chief Jorge Capitanich spoke of a “political interest” behind the various demonstrations that have followed Nisman’s still-unexplained death last month.

Even so, both officials echoed the marchers’ demand for answers in the investigation of the prosecutor’s “suspicious death,” which came a few days after Nisman accused the president, Foreign Minister Hector Timerman and six others of trying to conceal Iranian involvement in a 1994 attack on a Jewish organization in Buenos Aires that left 85 people dead.

Ruling party lawmaker Fernando “Chino” Navarro said Argentine democracy could be weakened if the probe of Nisman’s death does not produce a credible result.

The prosecutor was found dead Jan. 18 in his apartment. Nisman died of a single shot to the temple, fired from a gun he had borrowed from a colleague.

Wednesday’s march “was a resounding demonstration of society’s hope,” the leader of the opposition Renewal Front, Sergio Massa, said in a statement.

Massa is among the people vying to succeed Fernandez when she leaves office in December after serving two terms.

Another presidential hopeful, rightist Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri, told Radio Mitre he felt that he had been part of “a historic day” on Wednesday.

He also blasted Fernandez, who, he said, “doesn’t listen to anyone.”

Nisman’s ex-wife, Sandra Arroyo Salgado, is demanding that the investigation into his death be monitored by a representative of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

“In this judicial, political and media conjuncture, the guarantees for a totally impartial, risk-free investigation do not exist,” she said in an interview with Vorterix radio.

Nisman was the special prosecutor for the 1994 attack on the AMIA organization.

His accusation against Fernandez, taken up last week by prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita, cites the Memorandum of Understanding her administration signed with Iran in 2013 to facilitate the AMIA investigation as the principal instrument of the purported cover-up.

The late prosecutor said that intercepts of telephone calls among some of the prospective defendants – though not Fernandez or Timerman – showed the outlines of a plan for Argentina to get Interpol to rescind the red notices the international police agency had issued for the arrest of Iranians accused in the AMIA bombing.

Yet the man who headed Interpol for 15 years until last November rebutted Nisman’s key accusation.

“I can say with 100 percent certainty, not a scintilla of doubt, that Foreign Minister Timerman and the Argentine government have been steadfast, persistent and unwavering that the Interpol’s red notices be issued, remain in effect and not be suspend or removed,” Ronald K. Noble said last month.

Many in the Argentine Jewish community believe the AMIA bombing was ordered by Iran and carried out by Tehran’s Hezbollah allies.

Both the Iranian government and the Lebanese militia group deny any involvement and the accusation relies heavily on information provided by the CIA and Israel’s Mossad spy agency.

Prosecutors have yet to secure a single conviction in the case.

In September 2004, 22 people accused in the bombing were acquitted after a process plagued with delays, irregularities and tales of witnesses’ being paid for their testimony

Mexican Army Base Attacked in Protest over Missing Students

CHILPANCINGO, Mexico – Some 200 students took part in an attack on the headquarters of a Mexican army unit in the capital of the southern state of Guerrero to protest the disappearance of 43 of their classmates late September.

Nobody was hurt in the assault with Molotov cocktails on the 35th Infantry Battalion in Chilpancingo, which coincided with the 102nd anniversary of the army’s founding.

“We are missing 43,” students from the Ayotzinapa teachers college wrote on the base’s main gate.

The students, some wielding sticks and machetes, kept up the assault for only a few minutes before boarding four buses for the trip back to the college in Tixtla, Guerrero.

Families of the 43 missing Ayotzinapa students are seeking an investigation of the army’s role in the violent events of Sept. 26 in Iguala, Guerrero.

That night, police attacked Ayotzinapa students as they traveled through the town on buses. Six people – including three students – were killed and 43 other students abducted.

Federal authorities say the incident was the work of corrupt municipal cops acting on the orders of a corrupt mayor who had connections with the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.

The cops handed over the students to cartel gunmen, who killed the young people and burned their bodies at a dump, according to the official account.

The students’ families reject that version of events and are demanding to know why soldiers of the Iguala-based 27th Infantry Battalion who witnessed the police attack did not intervene.

In December, respected newsweekly Proceso published a story drawing on a confidential Guerrero state government document that pointed to Mexico’s Federal Police as the perpetrators of the slaughter of the 43 students.

And before the Proceso report, a group of scientists at the National Autonomous University of Mexico said that the federal attorney general’s account of the burning of the students’ bodies “has no support in facts or in physical, chemical or natural phenomena.”

Leaders renew backing of tattered Ukraine ceasefire

Kiev (AFP) - The leaders of Ukraine, Germany, France and Russia on Thursday pledged renewed support for a tattered ceasefire in eastern Ukraine despite violations -- including the storming of a key town by pro-Russian rebels.

 

As the leaders condemned the fighting and urged both sides to observe the truce, there was strident opposition from the separatists and Moscow to a plea from Ukraine for international peacekeepers to enforce the ceasefire.

Washington said pro-Russian rebels had broken the ceasefire more than 250 times since it came into force on Sunday.The Ukrainian army, meanwhile, said 90 troops had been captured and 82 were still missing after the rebels seized the strategic town of Debaltseve.

The seizure of the town, a transport hub sandwiched between the rebel strongholds of Donetsk and Lugansk, sent government troops into retreat.

The insurgents claimed to have captured as many as 300 government soldiers.

One of the rebel leaders, Alexander Zakharchenko, said that 3,000 to 3,500 troops died in the assault, although such casualty counts on both sides are often greatly exaggerated for propaganda effect.

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Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko addresses the Security and Defence Council in Kiev on February  …

"Let Kiev take their dead," he said.

- Peacekeeper call -

Kiev's defeat in Debaltseve, which has had many Ukrainians questioning the competence of their military leaders, prompted Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to appeal for international peacekeepers to be deployed in the east.

Poroshenko again raised the proposal in a four-way telephone conversation Thursday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and Russian President Vladimir Putin, his office said.

He found little apparent support, however, with none of the others mentioning it in statements from their offices, and Moscow denying it was mentioned at all.

Instead, the four called for the implementation of the full package of measures agreed in Minsk, including a full ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons and the release of prisoners, according to the French presidency.

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Armed pro-Russian rebels stand near a wrecked building in Uglegorsk, near Debaltseve, on February 19 …

They also called for observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to be able to carry out their task of monitoring the ceasefire.

West Bank - Freed Palestinian schoolgirl insists on her innocence

BEITIN, West Bank (AFP) -- A 14-year-old girl who has become a symbol for Palestinian minors arrested by Israel insisted on Saturday after serving a 45-day sentence that she had been unjustly imprisoned.
"I do not admit to any crime: I was not throwing stones -- I had no knife on me," Malak al-Khatib told AFP.

She was arrested on her way home from school on Dec. 31, and a military court sentenced her in late January to two months as part of a plea bargain in which she admitted to picking up a stone to throw at Israeli cars.

Malak was convicted of being in possession of a knife with the intention of using it to stab security personnel if arrested.

"After two hours of interrogation, a soldier forced me to sign a paper in Hebrew," said Malak, who does not understand the language.

A white and black Palestinian kuffiyeh scarf draped across her shoulders, Malak sat among friends as relatives, Palestinian officials and journalists paraded through the family home, as they have since her release on Friday. 

"I'll definitely have plenty to tell my classmates when I go back to school" in three days, she said at her house in Beitin near Ramallah in the West Bank, such as "how cold it is inside prison."

She served her time in a cell with three older Palestinian girls. The Palestinian Prisoner's Society said two weeks were deducted from the sentence because of her age.

Israel arrests around 1,000 children every year in the West Bank, often on charges of stone-throwing, according to rights group Defense for Children International Palestine.

Malak's arrest attracted more attention than most cases because she is a girl.

The Prisoners' Club estimates that of 200 Palestinian minors in Israeli prisons, only four are female and Malak was the youngest.

Her family repeatedly said that none of its members had ever been arrested by the Israelis before, a rarity in the occupied West Bank.

Her father Ali al-Khatib said on Saturday he was "very pleased and touched by the many visitors who came to congratulate Malak."

But his daughter was beginning to show the strain, whispering to her mother: "Do you think this will go on for long? I'm tired of all these visits."

Tucson AZ - Cold Case homicide -see photo

On September 22, 2011, the Tucson Police Department received a 9-1-1 call requesting a welfare check on a resident that had been living at 190 W. Valencia Road #226.  

Management personnel at the apartment complex had called to report a foul odor coming from the apartment and facilitated officers getting into the apartment.  Once inside the apartment, officers discovered the body of Jorge Martinez-Torres.  Martinez-Torres had obvious signs of trauma and it appeared that he had been deceased for several days.

Detectives from the Homicide Unit continue the investigation and are now seeking the public's assistance in identifying and locating the below pictured subject.  It is believed that he may have information pertinent to this investigation.  Anyone with information 

regarding his identity or whereabouts is asked to call the Tucson Police Department Homicide Unit at 520-791-4800 or 911.  In addition, anonymous tips can be called in to 88-Crime or Submit a Web Tip here.