The Associated Press agency published an interview with German reporter Marcus Hellwig, who was arrested with his photographer after entering Iran on a tourist visa in October 2010 and interviewing the son of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, an Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery in a case that generated international outrage. In this interview the journalist recounts the abuses he had to bear as a prisoner. Hellwig and photographer Jens Koch were split up and Hellwig said he was initially thrown into a plain 65 sq. foot (6 sq. meter) cell kept brightly lit 24 hours a day, but without a window or toilet. There was no furniture, only a carpet to lie on. Hellwig said he was held in a facility run by the Pasdaran, Iran’s feared Revolutionary Guard elite forces, and heard “terrifying cries” of inmates being abused every day.
In the meantime the US government expressed its concern that Iran will consider a terrorist attack on American soil, but it has no specific or credible threat about such a plot. Police from Los Angeles to New York City said they were anxious about the risks, even as a senior U.S. intelligence official reassured Congress that it was unlikely Iran would attack. In his turn, an Israeli counter-terrorism official also says Iran and Hezbollah are plotting more attacks overseas.
According to a Guardian columnist, the British prime minister is heading to Paris for talks with the French president on nuclear energy, Syria and Iran. The columnist provides live updates of the visit. Another expert suggests that deals to build unmanned drones and develop civil nuclear power, alongside the issue of help for Syrian rebels, will form the centrepiece of the annual Franco-British summit led by David Cameron and the electioneering French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in Paris. The British prime minister will be accompanied by the foreign secretary, William Hague, the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, the energy secretary, Ed Davey, and the defence secretary, Philip Hammond. They are likely to recall the high watermark of their partnership last year by celebrating the anniversary of the battle to bring down Colonel Gaddafi. The two countries dominate European defence spending and will mark the next stage in defence co-operation by agreeing in principle to build unmanned drones by 2020. The Europeans, taking the dominant forward role in the Libyan air campaign, were struck by their lack of unmanned aerial surveillance capability, leading to a heavy reliance on US drones. Britain and France will sign a preliminary statement of intent and plan joint research to be led by Dassault and BAE.
The Hurriyet Daily News reported that the family of a Syrian defector allegedly handed over to the Syrian government by a Turkish intelligence officer believes their loved one is currently being held in Iran. Hussein al-Harmoush has been missing for the past six months, his family has said. The defector’s wife, four sons and his brother are residents at a refugee camp in the southern province of Hatay.
The Washington Post informed its readers that Anthony Shadid, a gifted foreign correspondent whose graceful dispatches for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The Associated Press covered nearly two decades of Middle East conflict and turmoil, died, apparently of an asthma attack, on Thursday while on a reporting assignment in Syria. Mr. Shadid, 43, had been reporting inside Syria for a week, gathering information on the Free Syrian Army and other armed elements of the resistance to the government of President Bashar al-Assad, whose military forces have been engaged in a harsh repression of the political opposition in a conflict that is now nearly a year old. The Syrian government, which tightly controls foreign journalists’ activities in the country, had not been informed of his assignment by The Times. The exact circumstances of Mr. Shadid’s death and his precise location inside Syria when it happened were not immediately clear.
