U.S. says Iran refuses to answer queries on President's past

Iran Focus: a pro-MEK website

The United States said on Thursday that Iran had refused to answer queries on the suspected role of its hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said that there remained “unanswered questions” regarding the incident and that the only way to completely resolve them was to have “definitive statements” from the Iranian president and government.

Neither of them, he said, had answered the outstanding queries. READ MORE

In July, the White House said that Ahmadinejad was a leader of the student movement that organised the takeover of the U.S. embassy on November 4, 1979. "Mr. Ahmadinejad was a leader of the student movement that organised the attack on the embassy and the taking of American hostages”, a White House spokesman said. “However, we are still investigating whether or not he was explicitly one of the hostage-takers”.

Several Americans who were held during the 444-day-long hostage crisis have said they recognised Ahmadinejad as a ringleader.

“We in no way want to discount the recollections of those who say that he was involved in some fashion in the questioning and the holding of the hostages”, McCormack said, adding that the “ball is in the Iranians' court” in order to answer these unresolved questions.

“Certainly we have not forgotten the events of that date and the subsequent 444 days. The act of taking that embassy was a criminal act”, the State Department’s spokesman said.

“And certainly we think that it is incumbent upon President Ahmadinejad and the Iranian Government to answer these unanswered questions”.

In addition to his role in the 1979 hostage crisis, Ahmadinejad has also been implicated in the assassination of a Kurdish dissident in Vienna in 1989. He is believed to have been in the hit squad that coordinated and carried out the attack.

According to reliable accounts revealed by Iran Focus, Ahmadinejad has been involved in other terrorist operations carried out by the Iranian regime abroad and led firing squads that executed hundreds of political prisoners in Tehran’s Evin Prison in the 1980s.