US Rejects Transfer Of Funds In Prisoner Swap Deal With Iran

In a video message, Abdolhamid, the religious leader of Iran’s largely Sunni Baluch population, said security forces opened fire on people as they were returning to their homes after the Friday prayers in Zahedan. 

Calling the killings an "unprecedented disaster," he claimed that the plainclothes agents started shooting in response to a small number of youths who threw stones at the police station, but there were many people among those shot that were saying their prayers and were not even chanting slogans. 

"According to the reports that we obtained, the forces of the special unit were apparently already stationed in the said police station," he added. 

At least 41 people were killed during the bloody Friday in Zahedan in southeastern Iran, increasing the death toll in the current protests in Iran to 133, the Oslo-based NGO, Iran Human Rights reported on Sunday. At least 200 more people were injured as police opened fire at protesters.

The Sunni cleric also confirmed reports last Friday about the rape of a 15-year-old girl in June by Colonel Ebrahim Khouchakzai, the commander of the police in the city of Chabahar.

IRNA confirmed on Sunday that a prisoner swap deal has been finalized between Tehran and Washington, according to which Iran’s blocked money in South Korea well be released. The report, however, did not mention the name of the Iranian(s) who are supposed to be freed.

On Saturday, reports said that an Iranian-American hostage, Siamak Namazi was released from Tehran’s Evin prison in a one-week renewable furlough. Namazi has spent 7 years in jail on Trumped-up espionage charges. His father Baquer Namazi who went to Iran to free his son in 2016 was also arrested and accused of espionage, but later freed from prison on medical grounds and now has been allowed to leave Iran. 

United Nations spokesperson Stephane Dujarric announced about Namazis in a statement on Saturday. 

Iran's Nour news said Saturday that the deal is the result of intensive negotiations in recent weeks with the mediation of a regional country regarding the simultaneous release of Iranian and American prisoners. Iran had earlier claimed that the $7 billion would be freed in exchange for the release of three American dual citizens.

Nuclear negotiations since April 2021 between Tehran and Washington are stalled, and a prisoner deal could be a positive signal for a resolution, but Washington has not confirmed the Iranian claims.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a tweet that Canada has sanctioned dozens of individuals and entities in Iran, and will continue holding the regime accountable for its actions.

Moreover, Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly said, "The Iranian regime continues to show disregard for human rights. As Iranian people protest the killing of Mahsa Amini, people in Canada are also marching in solidarity with them. Canada will hold Iran accountable for its crimes."

Tens of thousands of people marched in several Canadian cities, including Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, on Saturday in solidarity with protests in Iran. According to different estimates, about 30 to 50 thousand people participated in the gathering in Toronto.

On September 26, Trudeau announced that Ottawa will impose sanctions on those responsible for the death of the 22-year-old woman, including Iran's so-called morality police and its leadership. “To the women in Iran who are protesting: We are with you,” he said. 

Mahsa’s death in the custody of hijab police sparked protests in her hometown in the western Kordestan province and capital Tehran that quickly spread around the country. Young protesters have held demonstrations every evening since September 18, defying Iran’s notorious security forces that in November 2019 killed at least 1,500 protesters in less than a week.

Esmaeilion made the plea in an interview with Iran International after the demonstrations against the Islamic Republic in Toronto on Saturday, when Iranian diaspora communities and human rights activists held unprecedented rallies in over 150 cities throughout the world. 

Esmaeilion – the spokesman for the families of victims of Ukrainian flight PS752 shot down by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in January 2020 – urged world countries to expel Tehran’s envoys. His wife and young daughter were among the 176 people onboard the airliner.

"This can be a start for Europeans and countries that have Iranian embassies to behave properly” in response to worldwide protests against the regime in Tehran, he said. 

He added that the Iranians are showing the world that they do not want the Islamic Republic and that its officials do not represent the people of Iran. 

Many people in Iran and abroad have been holding regular protests since the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old woman whose murder in the hands of hijab police has sparked an uprising. The level of unanimity and support from foreign leaders and officials as well as celebrities and well-known figures is unprecedented.

Hacker group Backdoor (3ackd0or) provided Iran International with documents about the four police officers who stopped Mahsa along with a few of his relatives in Tehran and took her to the Vozara police station in a police van. According to reports, she suffered at least one severe blow to her head that led to her death in the following hours. 

Iran International has no knowledge of how they obtained this information, which cannot be independently verified.

The commander of the team was Captain Enayatollah Rafiei, 52 years old and from the town of Khodabandeh in northwestern Zanjan province.

The other male agent of the team was identified as Sergeant Ali Khoshnamvand, 27 years old and from the village of (Khoshnamvand) Khushnamvand in the Kouhdashtdistrictof Lorestan province in western Iran.

Parastou Safari is 36 years old and was born in the eastern city of Kermanshah. She is probably the female agent who deemed Mahsa’s clothing “inappropriate” and decided to take her to the station for “a short training on Islamic dress code.”

Fatemeh Ghorban-Hosseini is 27 years old, the youngest of the team that arrested Mahsa and was born and raised in the capital Tehran.

The authorities first tried to spread disinformation that Mahsa Amini had an illness which caused her death, but soon information emerged that severe blows had broken her skull and caused a coma after two hours of her arrest.

Her death almost immediately led to protests in her home province of Kordestan in Western Iran and then spread to the capital Tehran and other cities. The government resorted to brutal force against demonstrators and so far at least 150 people have died, with the largest single-day toll on September 30 in the city of Zahedan where 42 local protesters were shot.

On Thursday, September 29, Mohammad-Bagher Bakhtiar, a former commander of the Revolutionary Guard during Iran's 1980-88 war with Iraq, published an audio file quoting informed sources at the Forensic Medicine Organization as saying that Amini died because of a "blow to her skull".

Iran International had earlier published Mahsa's skull CT scan which showed bone fracture, hemorrhage and brain edema. The medical documents and dozens of exclusive images sent to Iran International by a hacktivist group vividly show a skull fracture on the right side of her head caused by a severe trauma to the skull, which corroborate earlier accounts by her family and doctors about her being hit several times on the head, proving that the Iranian police's claim that she suffered a heart attack was untrue.

An eyewitness told Iran International last week that Mahsa had told her in a detention room that an officer had hit her on the head.