Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Where is Ebrahim Yazdi?

An e-mail from a close friend in Austin, this morning:
I received the following message this morning from Arif Noorbaksh, a friend of mine from UT days who lives in Austin. The events in Iran have struck especially close to home for him:
This morning, we got news that my grandfather, Dr. Ebrahim Yazdi, was arrested. He was Foreign Minister under the post-revolution provisional government and is currently Secretary-General of the Freedom Movement of Iran (FMI). He was at a Tehran-area hospital being treated for dehydration due to a gastrointestinal ailment, and our news is that they arrested and took him from the hospital to an undisclosed location...He's a reformer...I need to publicize this...they are less likely to kill him if his name is all over the place.
The title of this post links to an interview with Yazdi in Reuters published on June 15. From that interview:
TEHRAN, June 15 (Reuters) - An opposition politician said on Monday that Iran's disputed presidential election had exposed deepening divisions in the establishment and the Islamic Republic faced its biggest crisis since the 1979 revolution.

Ebrahim Yazdi, leader of the banned Freedom Movement, also said seven of its members had been detained after last Friday's vote and warned of worsening "political suppression" in Iran.

"It is a turning point in the history of the Islamic Republic," he told Reuters in an interview in his Tehran home.

1 comment:

highlowbetween said...

I saw this info over at Sullivan - Yazdi had also stated that a coup was pending a few weeks ago - at least that's what I thought I read.