Iran president alleged terrorist

Published: 8:50PM Thursday June 30, 2005 Source: Reuters

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Former hostages in the 1979 takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran have identified Iran's president-elect Mahmood Ahmadinejad as a key player in their 444-day ordeal, The Washington Times said on Thursday.
  
"The new president of Iran is a terrorist," retired Army Colonel Charles Scott, 73, a former hostage told the daily.
  
"As soon as I saw his picture in the paper, I knew that was the bastard...He was one of the top two or three leaders." said Scott, who lives in Jonesboro, Georgia.
  
Ahmadinejad, 49, trounced moderate cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in the second round run-off of Friday's presidential vote to record the greatest upset in Iranian political history. Washington deemed the elections illegitimate.
 
A veteran of the Revolutionary Guards whose aides deny he has any blood on his hands, Ahmadinejad was a founding member of the Office for Strengthening Unity Between Universities and Theological Seminaries (OSU), which organised the storming of the US Embassy compound in Tehran, according to the Times.
  
Ahmadinejad's office, said The Washington Times, denied he helped storm the embassy, but did not comment on whether he had other duties during the hostage crisis.
  
Donald Sharer, a retired Navy captain who was for a time a cellmate of Scott at the Evin prison in northern Tehran, remembered Ahmadinejad as "a hard-liner, a cruel individual".
  
"I know he was an interrogator," said Sharer, 64, who recalls he was personally questioned by Ahmadinejad on one occasion.
  
Kevin Hermening, who was a Marine security guard at the US Embassy and, at 20, became the youngest hostage, also remembered Iran's president-elect.
  
"He was involved in interrogating me the day we were taken captive," he said, adding that the Iranians were seeking the combinations of safes in the compound.
  
"There is absolutely no reason the United States should be trying to normalise relations with a man who seems intent on trying to force-feed the world with state-sponsored terrorism," Hermening said.
  
On November 4, 1979, 90 people inside the US Embassy compound in Tehran were taken hostage. Fifty-two remained in captivity until they were released 444 days later, on January 20, 1981, when US President Ronald Reagan was inaugurated.

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