Episode highlights risk of escalation
This appears to be a disturbing incident, analyst says
Washington/New York: Political analysts said that the most recent episode underscored the risks that chance encounters between US and Iranian forces in the heavily militarised gulf could quickly escalate into confrontation.
”This appears to be a disturbing incident, especially if it happened over international waters,” said Alireza Nader, an Iran specialist at the Washington offices of the RAND Corp., a research group. “It is in the interests of the United States to act with restraint regarding this incident.”
On Thursday, US officials also announced new sanctions that broadened the blacklist of Iranian individuals and institutions affected by laws freezing or blocking access to property and other assets.
The latest entries on the list include Iran’s communications minister, Reza Taqipour; the head of the Iranian national police, Esmail Ahmadi Moghaddam; and Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which State and Treasury Department officials accused of jamming satellite broadcasts, disrupting Internet activities, censoring news media and intimidating and detaining journalists.
Two Tehran schools, Imam Hossein University and Baghyatollah Medical Sciences University, are also on the new list. Treasury officials described them as training and research centres created and run by the Revolutionary Guards.
”These actions underscore the administration’s ongoing commitment to hold Iranian government officials and entities responsible for the abuses carried out against their own citizens,” Victoria Nuland, a State Department spokeswoman, said in a statement.
The new sanctions coincided with reports by international rights groups that an Iranian blogger, Sattar Beheshti, who was arrested in Tehran last week, might have died during or after an interrogation in prison. Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom advocacy group, said that Beheshti, 35, had been accused by the authorities of “actions against national security on social networks and Facebook,” and that his family had been ordered to retrieve his body, bury him quickly and not talk about it. The group did not disclose the source of its information, and the details could not be immediately confirmed. Reporters Without Borders urged the Iranian authorities to explain the death, and it said that other nations should not “allow this crime to go unpunished.”
NYT
