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Washington Times reporter has been held since 17 June after being arrested at Tehran airport

Vigorous efforts are being made to secure the release of an Anglo-Greek journalist imprisoned in Iran since 17 June following erroneous reports yesterday that he was “hours away” from being freed.

Iason Athanasiadis-Fowden, a freelance assigned by the Washington Times to cover the country’s presidential elections last month, was in prison in Tehran, a spokesman for the Greek Foreign Ministry said.

“I can confirm that he is there, that we are in constant contact with the Iranian authorities and are working vigorously to have this issue resolved,” spokesman Grigoris Delavekouris told MediaGuardian.co.uk.

Athanasiadis-Fowden, aged 30, who holds joint British and Greek nationality, was arrested at Tehran airport as he was about to fly back to his base in Istanbul five days after the disputed election.

While no charges have been brought against him, initial reports suggested that he was detained because of “visa irregularities”.

Yesterday, Giorgos Karadzerferis, the leader of Greece’s small far-right LAOS party, publicly announced that the reporter’s release was imminent, going as far as to say that it would be made “in the next few hours”. The announcement was subsequently reported by local media and international news agencies.

Earlier this week, the press freedom campaigning body, Reporters sans Frontieres, claimed that 40 journalists had been arrested since unrest flared following the poll.

Athanasiadis-Fowden, who lived and studied in Iran and has written eloquently about the country for an array of media outlets including the Guardian, is thought to be the only western journalist held in detention.

Calls for his release have been made by Amnesty International, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists and Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation, where he was enrolled as a fellow last year.

The reporter was travelling on his Greek passport when Iranian officers seized him. He was described as being in “good health” by the Greek ambassador Nikos Garilides, who visited him in jail last week.

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For all those who wish to commemorate Neda, democracy can be delivered – with the help of legitimate monitors

So it’s official. Iran’s Guardian Council has, after ordering a random recount of some 10% of the votes, endorsed the supreme leader’s judgment that there was nothing wrong with the conduct and hastily proclaimed official result of Iran’s presidential election. What the supreme leader called a “divine assessment” is now confirmed. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the duly elected president of the Islamic Republic. Anyone who dares go on the streets to dispute this result will be duly beaten up, incarcerated, tortured or shot.

Now even if that election had been the most pristine in the whole history of democracy, the scale of subsequent opposition demonstrations and the arbitrary violence of the repression – symbolised by the death of Neda Soltan – would still have transformed the political situation in Iran irreversibly. What happens next will not depend on any slowly emerging details about the vote. Dates to watch include next week’s 9 July anniversary of the 1999 student protests and the end of the 40-day mourning period for a young woman the world now knows simply as Neda. Clerical manoeuvrings in darkest Qom, the exceptional solidarity of the whole EU with perennial whipping-boy Britain, US policy, the health of the supreme leader, the price of oil – all will have more influence than historical psephology.

Some even take the view that what really happened in the election is not so important anyway. What matters is who comes out on top. What matters is a deeper truth, whether revealed by prayer to Allah or by western abhorrence of an Islamic Republic. What matters is who manages to impose their own “narrative”. (Postmodernism has become the whore of power politics.)

I profoundly disagree with this position. Facts matter, and we must stick to them. Take, for example, an open letter whose most prominent signatory is Bernard-Henri Levy. “On June 12, 2009,” says the letter, in the English language version posted on the Huffington Post, “the Iranian people voted overwhelmingly for the two reform candidates, deftly using the ballot to give a resounding ‘no’ to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had openly positioned himself in favour of the incumbent President Ahmadinejad.” I do not know the methods even of French philosophy that could justify such a firm, unqualified empirical statement about a disputed reality. We must not confuse our wishes with facts.

Facts matter – including the fact that in this case the relevant facts are difficult to establish. But experts are at work on the available evidence. What they have found so far justifies two claims. First, it is highly improbable that Ahmadinejad won a first-round victory on the scale that the Iranian authorities so swiftly announced, and there are strong circumstantial indications of likely fraud. If all the genuine votes, and only they, had been accurately counted, Ahmadinejad might still have won, or it might have gone to a second-round run-off; but it would surely not have been this nationwide first-round landslide. Second, it is certain that the conduct of this election fell far short of internationally recognised standards for free and fair elections, as spelled out in the authoritative General Comment of the UN human rights committee on article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which the Islamic Republic is a signatory.

Those circumstantial indications include official figures so far published. The Iranian specialist Ali Ansari notes in a Chatham House study that recorded turnout in two provinces, Yazd and Mazandaran, was more than 100% of eligible voters. Disputing opposition claims that turnout was also put above 100% in more than a hundred cities, the Guardian Council itself says that “there are only about 50 such cities or towns” in which that was the case. Only 50! Yes, people can vote wherever they like in Iran, but that’s an awful lot of people away from home – and all of them voting.

Michigan University’s Walter R Mebane uses mind-stretching statistical forensics on the official figures to reach this interim conclusion: “The data give very strong support for a diagnosis that the 2009 election was affected by significant fraud.” The pattern of the results, he adds, “strongly suggests there was ballot-box stuffing”. He counsels that such a finding “should prompt investigations using administrative records, witness testimony and other facts to try to determine what happened” – but precisely that is almost impossible in today’s Iran.

In order to check these things properly, you need the results from each individual polling station, counted, written down and certified on the spot, in the presence of independent witnesses. Mark Weisbrot suggests in an article on washingtonpost.com, citing conversations with a professor at Tehran University and a single Iranian poll worker, that that is what happened in Iran. Indeed, that is what was supposed to happen; but there is a body of anecdotal evidence to indicate that opposition observers were prevented from checking the results in some polling places. So far as I can establish, no credible international election monitors were present. Weisbrot himself acknowledges that his account does not include the mobile ballot boxes – a classic opportunity for ballot-box stuffing.

Rather than being built from the bottom up – from individual precinct to province to national – the results were announced from the top down, and with quite implausible speed, given that voters had to handwrite the names of candidates on their ballot paper. The election was run by the conservative-controlled interior ministry and overseen by the Guardian Council, half of whose members are directly appointed by the supreme leader. The Guardian Council was then invited to investigate itself. This hardly qualifies as the “independent electoral authority” envisaged in the notes to article 25 of the ICCPR. And so it goes on.

There is no smoking gun, in the sense of proof positive of major electoral fraud. But, as two experienced election analysts write, “the smoking gun is in fact the process” – one that makes fraud so easy and uncovering it so hard. In any case, to ask the people to prove that the government has rigged the election is back to front. The onus is on a government to demonstrate to its people that an election has been free and fair. Which, in this case, it has obviously failed to do.

There’s a lesson here, both for sympathisers outside and for young Iranians. International election monitoring is a growing field, in which Europe plays a leading role, but it is still too often seen as a western imposition rather than as the even-handed implementation of a genuinely universal norm. It needs to be internationalised across cultures and regions. Domestically, since Iran has a fractured regime, a political system with real if limited elements of democracy, and a vigorous civil society, there’s a chance of making the next election better than this last one. The object of people power, on the streets, should be to achieve that lasting institutionalisation of people power which we call democracy. In memory of Neda, hold aloft article 25.

• Attack on ‘obsession with security’ follows arrests
• First statement since poll result rubber-stamped

Iran’s defeated presidential challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, declared today that he considered Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s new government illegitimate, and called for protests to continue.

In a defiant statement posted on his website, the moderate leader also called for the release of detained “children of the revolution” – a reference to reformist figures arrested since the 12 June poll. Iran’s national police chief said 1,032 people had been detained and most freed. The rest had been “referred to the public and revolutionary courts”.

Mousavi’s language seemed chosen to suggest that the Islamic regime, which in the last two weeks has seen the worst unrest in 30 years, was betraying the basic principles of the 1979 revolution.

“It is our historical responsibility to continue our protests and not to abandon our efforts to preserve the nation’s rights,” insisted the former prime minister.

“From now on we will have a government which from the point of view of ties with the public is in the weakest of positions. A majority of society, of which I personally am a member, do not accept the legitimacy of this government.”

Mousavi also demanded an end to the regime’s “obsession” with security, the reform of electoral laws he believes were abused, the constitutional right to free political assembly, an end to restrictions on the media, and the right to set up independent television stations.

It was his first public statement since Monday’s final certification by the guardian council – Iran’s top legislative body – that there had been no “major irregularities” in the election after a partial recount, despite widespread complaints and suspicions of vote-rigging.

Mousavi quickly won heavyweight support from Iran’s former reformist president, Mohammed Khatami, who decried what he called a “velvet coup against democracy” – a mirror image of the charge by the regime that foreign powers such as Britain and the US are pushing for a “velvet revolution” in the country. “People’s protests were suppressed, those who were required to protect people’s rights humiliated the people … yet it [the government] speaks of national reconciliation and peace,” said Khatami.

Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist presidential candidate, said on his website: “I don’t consider this government legitimate. I will continue the fight under any circumstances and using every means.”

Analysts said the reformists were seeking to set the tone for the future and keep the hopes of their supporters alive despite the election result and subsequent crackdown. “They want to turn opposition activity into a civil society movement that operates within the law,” said Baqer Moin, biographer of Ayatollah Khomeini. “This means there will be a collective reformist effort to prepare for the next election, undermining Ahmadinejad and warning the leadership that the Islamic Republic will lose the confidence of the people. They are saying ‘we lost the battle but the war for democracy goes on’.”

Another Iranian expert said: “Mousavi’s demands are not new but they are very clear. This is a reformist manifesto … if the regime is looking for a political solution – and they might be because the reformists are too big a group to ignore – the demands could help the regime craft a deal at some point in the future.”

Others expect the hardliners to stand firm, especially after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, clearly expressed support for Ahmadinejad and called on the opposition to respect the president.

Ahmadinejad’s office gave no explanation today of why he cancelled a trip to Libya to attend an African summit. But as western governments ponder their next moves, Iran’s top military commander demanded that the EU apologise for its “interference” before any resumption of talks on Tehran’s disputed nuclear programme. “Before apologising for their huge mistake … they have no right to talk about nuclear negotiations,” Major-General Hassan Firouzabadi was quoted as saying by the Fars news agency.

Mousavi’s criticism of the Iran regime is no longer about the election – it’s about the future of the opposition movement

No election since the inception of the Islamic Republic has left the Iranian nation so divided in all its components as the one that took place on 12 June. It has divided the clergy in Qom, the leading political conservative or principalist actors in Tehran and the state institutions. It forced the supreme leader to side with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a great cost to his own position and the ruling clergy, undermining the very agreed consensus among the top officials. Statements issued by losing candidates Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi are a sad reflections of the Iranian reality couched in the language of hope for millions who are waiting in expectation that something might be done. “Not all is lost” is the core of their messages.

Both candidates are frank about the difficult predicaments they are in, and yet they want to keep the newly formed opposition movement united and act within the law. They want their supporters to use every opportunity to express their disapproval of what they consider an illegitimate government.

By emphatically saying all is not lost, it seems that they are banking on creating a democratic movement based on the constitution and preparing the ground for the next election, or for a time the ruling bloc exhaust itself with its radical policies.

The pragmatics among the conservatives are concerned about the handling of the election by the Guardian Council and the supreme leader’s office. “Ahmadinejad pulled wool over the supreme leader’s eyes” a leading conservative clergy is quoted as saying. Mousavi may well be banking on the fact that the conservatives would soon start to fight each other, as has been the case the in the past. Some may see this as a pious hope.

The election has also brought to light the depth of maturity in Iran’s civil society: calm, rational and pragmatic about change. Would the civil society keep its hope alive, or would it turn into a cynical, demoralised and depoliticised mass? This is the danger for Mousavi, Karroubi and Mohammad Khatami, the former president. That is why they are threading a fine line between remaining loyal to the constitution and at the same time containing the radicalisation of a movement that no longer wants to take the supremacy of the clergy for granted.

Mousavi made an interesting remark in his statement that illustrate the dynamism of the Iranian situation: “At the beginning, the objective for us all in participating in the election was to bring back religious rationalism to the management of the country, but en route we were guided towards higher objectives.” He goes on to conclude: “The rulers will have to understand that peoples’ votes and will are above them all, which they no longer can ignore.”

• Deposed dictator calls Osama bin Laden a ‘zealot’
• Iraqi told interviewers religion and government ’should not mix’

Saddam Hussein remained preoccupied with the threat from neighbouring Iran as the US-led invasion loomed and would have sought a security pact with the US if UN sanctions were lifted, he told an FBI interviewer in his jail cell before his execution.

In more than two dozen interviews and casual talks, the deposed Iraqi leader told FBI questioners that he refused to allowed UN inspectors to re-enter the country because he feared they would reveal to his chief adversary Iran the severely degraded state of Iraq’s weapons capability.

Saddam, whom the successor Iraqi government hanged in December 2006, also denied having any connection to Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida, and said that if he wanted to join forces with a US enemy, he would have sought a pact with North Korea or China.

Those details and others are revealed in newly released FBI reports of contacts between the jailed Hussein and FBI special agent George Piro, an Arabic speaker who met with the former Iraqi leader between February and June 2004.

The reports portray a deposed dictator who seems comfortable discussing subjects from Iraqi history to his daily work schedule and speechwriting practices with an investigator from the country that forced him from power. Hussein seems aware that he is to die soon, and justifies his record of modernising Iraq and surviving more than a decade of conflict with Iran and the US and crippling UN sanctions.

The reports were released by the National Security Archive, a Washington group that obtained them from the FBI. The reports contain a few deletions, and one interview, from May 1, 2004, was redacted in its entirety.

Saddam denounced bin Laden as a “zealot”. The former Iraqi leader described himself as a religious man and appears at least superficially pious, referring constantly to God and to Islam. But he said he believed religion and government “should not mix”, and said he and bin Laden do not share the same vision.

Although he had been deposed by the American army and seemed to understand he would soon be handed over to the Iraqis and executed, Saddam remained fixated on what he describes as Iran’s threat to Iraq. The two nations fought a brutal war between 1980 and 1988, costing as many as one million lives. He said that in recent years sanctions and UN inspections had degraded Iraq’s military capability while Iran had strengthened its armed forces.

He said that during the run-up to the US invasion in March 2003, he kept up his bluster about weapons of mass destruction in order to appear strong in front of Iran. Saddam said he believed Iran intended to annex majority Shia areas of southern Iraq, and saw the country as the greatest threat to Iraq. He said he viewed the other Arab countries in the region as weak and unable to defend against an attack from Iran. He said that he refused to allow UN inspectors to re-enter the country not because he still possessed prohibited weapons of mass destruction (he ordered the stock pile destroyed after the 1991 Persian Gulf war) but because he wanted Iran to believe he did.

“Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq,” the report of a June 11, 2004 interview states.

Asked how Iraq would have dealt with Iran if the UN inspections and sanctions were ended, he said he would have sought a security agreement with the US. Piro agreed such an arrangement would have benefited Iraq, but said the US would not quickly have made such a pact. He told Piro he wanted a more friendly relationship with the US, an ally during the war with Iran, but that the US “was not listening to anything Iraq had to say”.

Hussein declined several times to answer questions about his use of chemical weapons in the war with Iran. The FBI interviewers at one point show him a British-made documentary called “Saddam’s Latest War”, which offers evidence of atrocities and mass executions of Shia Iraqis. Saddam grew agitated and challenged the accuracy and neutrality of the journalist.

Hussein described a strict security regimen in the years before the US-led invasion. He said he had only spoken on the telephone twice since March 1990 and never stayed in the same location for more than a day, fearful that high-tech US surveillance would locate him. He said that the farm on which US soldiers discovered him in December 2003 was the same place to which he fled after taking part in a failed 1959 coup attempt.

The former Iraqi leader offered a few personal details. In one discussion, during which the cell’s air conditioning was under repair, Hussein told Piro he was used to living a simple lifestyle. Asked to explain his numerous, extravagant palaces, Hussein said they were created as exercises for Iraqi architects and to keep enemies from pinpointing the location of top regime officials during meetings. Hussein also said he typically would try to take time out of his work schedule to read fiction, “something he enjoyed very much”.
He said he had been keen to learn more about American culture, and had done so by watching Hollywood films.

He said he took time every day to meet with ordinary Iraqis, but acknowledged to Piro that many would be too frightened to be candid with him.

Saddam was apparently aware that he did not have much longer to live. At one point Piro expressly reminds him that he is no longer president of Iraq, that he is “done”, and that his life is nearing an end.

Piro “asked him if he wanted the remainder of his life to have meaning, to which he responded yes”.

Britain keeps option open to withdraw Tehran ambassador

The Iranian authorities are still holding two British embassy employees, who were detained in the wake of election protests, British sources said today.

The sources said two other Iranian members of the embassy staff had been released yesterday, not three as Iran’s state-run Press TV channel had reported.

British officials believe the threat of concerted European action has forced the Iranian regime to release most of the Iranian embassy workers it had accused of playing a role in the protests, an allegation Britain has rejected as absurd. Nine members of embassy staff were originally detained in coordinated arrests last weekend. Some of those released have been told they could be subject to further questioning.

In light of the latest two releases, Britain will no longer be asking its European partners to withdraw their ambassadors in Tehran in solidarity, as it had planned to at EU meetings scheduled in Stockholm and in Brussels. However, the British want the option kept on the table if Tehran fails to release the last two embassy detainees in the next few days, or takes any further action against British staff.

The US magazine Newsweek issued a statement today rejecting a report on Press TV on Wednesday that its correspondent, Maziar Bahari, detained since 21 June, had admitted “false and biased” reporting on the post-election protests. Noting that Bahari had not had access to a lawyer and calling for his immediate release, the Newsweek statement described him as “a veteran journalist whose long career, both in print and in documentary filmmaking, has been accurate, even-handed, and widely respected”.

We’ve added more photos and names to our database of victims of the unrest. Please keep sending us your submissions

Today we are publishing an update to our list of Iranians killed or arrested since last month’s presidential election. Many of you have submitted additional information and photographs for the people we had already identified, and others have sent in new names. This update adds photos where we have them and names some new people. We will add further names shortly.

Among the dead is Ashkan Sohrabi, an 18-year-old killed in the Tehran protests, whose sister gave an interview to Rooz Online. The numbers arrested include some not directly involved in the Mousavi or Karroubi campaigns, such as Mohammad Mostafaei, an anti-death penalty campaigner freed on bail after seven days in Tehran’s Evin prison, and Mitra Farahani, a Paris-based film director and painter arrested on arrival in Tehran.

In one of the most audacious arrests, which Reporters Without Borders called “totally unprecedented”, all 25 editorial staff of the Mousavi-owned Kalemeh Sabz newspaper were detained by plainclothes agents. Twenty-two have now been released.

There are still hundreds of people in jail. Again, if you can add to the details we have or can send photos of detainees, please use this form.

Iran’s opposition leader accused of nine offences in letter to chief prosecutor as Ahmadinejad cancels Libya trip

Iran’s opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi today became the target of the notorious Basij militia as it called for him to be prosecuted for his role in the greatest political unrest in Iran since the Islamic revolution.

In a letter to the country’s chief prosecutor, the Basij accuse Mousavi of involvement in nine offences against the state, including “disturbing the nation’s security”. That charge carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence.

The letter came as the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, cancelled a planned trip to Libya without explanation. The last-minute cancellation is being seen as a sign of the continuing volatility in Iran as the authorities struggle with the fallout from last month’s disputed election, in which Ahmadinejad was declared the winner.

One of the other candidates, Mehdi Karroubi, a reformist cleric, vowed to continue his fight to annul the election despite the endorsement of the poll by the powerful guardian council after a partial recount of the vote.

“I don’t consider this government legitimate,” Karroubi said on his website.

It was later reported that the daily Etemad-e-Melli, a newspaper allied to him, had been closed down.

In his statement Karroubi also demanded the release of “thousands” of people arrested during the unrest.

Iran’s police chief, Brigadier General Ismail Ahmadi-Moghaddam, said 1,032 people had been arrested since the 12 June election, but he claimed that most had since been released.

“Those who are still in detention were referred to the public and revolutionary courts in Tehran,” Fars News Agency quoted him as saying, according to Reuters.

Ahmadi-Moghaddam said 20 “rioters” had been killed during the unrest and more than 500 police had been injured.

He also asked Interpol to arrest Arash Hejazi, the doctor who was filmed coming to the aid of Neda Soltan after she was shot in the widely seen video of her death.

Hejazi fled to London after the incident and suggested that a Basij militiaman on a motorbike was responsible for her killing.

“Her killing was a planned scenario and had no relation with the riots in Tehran,” Ahmadi-Moghaddam said.