Region

CAIRO — Egypt’s former military chief on Monday took the final formal step to run in next month’s presidential election, submitting to the election commission eight times the number of signatures required, his campaign said in a statement.

Abdel-Fattah Al Sisi, a retired field marshal, did not deliver the 200,000 signatures in person. His campaign said a legal adviser, Mohammed Bahaa Abou Shaqah, delivered them.

Photos released by the campaign and footage aired on local TV networks showed security guards delivering white boxes with an image of the retired soldier plastered on the side along with the name of the province from which it said the signatures were obtained.

Officials from the election commission could not be reached to confirm the campaign’s statement.

It is mandatory for any presidential hopeful to secure 25,000 signatures from at least 15 of the nation’s 27 provinces in order to run in the May 26-27 vote. Sisi, who led the ouster of President Mohammed Morsi last July, was the first hopeful to submit the signatures.

Sisi’s likely chief rival in the election is leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahi, who finished a strong third in the first round of the last presidential election, in June 2012. Morsi won the race in a run-off against second-placed Ahmed Shafiq, the last prime minister to serve under ousted president Hosni Mubarak.

Sisi’s campaign says more signatures continue to pour into its Cairo headquarters, something it described as a “unique example of support and national backing” for the 59-year-old career soldier.

The US and British-trained Sisi is the most likely winner of next month’s vote. He has enjoyed nationwide support in the nine months since he ousted Morsi. Many Egyptians see him as a potential savior, delivering the nation of some 90 million people from its seemingly countless woes.

Sisi, however, has yet to announce an election programme that clearly spells out what he intends to do to revive the economy, restore security and save the vital tourism sector from its slump.

The two-day balloting is the second phase in a political blueprint announced by Sisi the day he ousted Morsi. The first was the drafting and adoption by referendum in January of a new constitution. The presidential ballot will be followed by a parliamentary election later this year.

On Monday, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, said the European Union would be sending an electoral observation mission for the May 26-27 vote.

“My big message to Egypt is and always was the same: this is a strong partnership; we want the people of Egypt to move forward, we do want these elections to herald the beginning of the next phase of life in Egypt,” she told reporters in Luxembourg about her visit last week to Cairo.

She added, however, that she had expressed her concern in Egypt about a recent court ruling that sentenced more than 500 Morsi supporters to death, and the jailing of activists and journalists. Egyptian authorities say the sentence is likely to be overturned on appeal.

The run-up to the election has been marred by continuing street protests by Morsi supporters, who clash nearly daily with security forces. Egyptian troops and police, meanwhile, continue to battle Islamic militants in the strategic northern part of the Sinai Peninsula and elsewhere.

In the latest violence, a Morsi supporter was killed on Monday with a gunshot to the head in clashes at Cairo University between pro-and anti-Morsi students, according to a security official. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media, identified the student as Mohammed Adel. Two local journalists were also injured in clashes between security forces and students supporting Morsi, the official added.

Beside Cairo university, there were clashes also on Monday between Islamist students and security forces at the capital’s Islamic Al Azhar University as well as campuses in the Nile Delta city of Zagazig and the southern city of Assiut, according to the interior ministry, which is in charge of police.

Nearly 30 students were injured and 17 injured in the clashes in Assiut, a hotbed of Islamists some 400 Kilometres south of Cairo.

At least 16,000 Morsi supporters have been detained and hundreds killed in the nine months since the military takeover. Morsi himself and most leaders of his Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group from which he hails, are on trial on charges that range from espionage and incitement of murder to corruption and conspiring with foreign groups. Some of the charges carry the death penalty.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (Reuters) — Israel has carried out a new land appropriation in the occupied West Bank, the Haaretz daily said on Sunday, in a move that could complicate efforts to extend troubled peace talks with the Palestinians.

Haaretz said the defence ministry declared nearly 100 hectares of territory in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc just south of Jerusalem "state land".

Asked by Reuters about the report, the ministry declined to comment but said it might have something to say in the coming days.

The land appropriation, the left-leaning newspaper said, was the largest in years and could eventually lead to the expansion of several settlements and authorisation of a settler outpost built without Israeli government permission in 2001.

The measure, which falls short of annexing the land to Israel, is based on an Israeli interpretation of an Ottoman-era law that allowed the confiscation of tracts that had not been planted or cultivated for several years in a row.

Haaretz said the heads of nearby Palestinian villages that claimed the land as theirs were informed of the move last week and have 45 days to appeal.

It was not immediately clear whether the reported appropriation was part of sanctions that Israel has begun to impose in response to the April 1 signing by Palestinians of 15 international conventions and agreements during the current crisis in US-brokered peace negotiations.

Mohammed Shtayyeh, a senior official in the Palestinian negotiating team, said the move showed Israel was more concerned with expanding its control of West Bank land than in peace talks.

"[The Israeli government] will do everything possible in order to turn its occupation into annexation of our land. The decision ... is simply a reflection of [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's will to strengthen settlements and bury the two-state solution," he said in a statement.

Israeli optimism

Speaking before the Haaretz report appeared, Israel's chief peace negotiator, Tzipi Livni said on the YNet news site that she is optimistic the statehood negotiations will be extended beyond the original April 29 deadline for a deal.

“I believe that we are close enough to a decision on the part of both leaderships, encouraged by the Americans, to continue the negotiations,” she said.

Livni has been meeting her Palestinian counterpart Saeb Erekat in an intensive push over the past few days to try to salvage the talks.

Last week, US Secretary of State John Kerry suggested that Israel’s publication on April 1 of a tender for 708 housing units for settlers in East Jerusalem was the proximate cause for the near collapse of the talks, which began in July.

Israel’s anti-settlement Peace Now movement said on its website that at least 90 of the 120 Jewish settlements built in the occupied West Bank since its capture in a 1967 war are on “state land”. Most countries regard the settlements as illegal.

Palestinians seek a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and fear settlements will deny them a viable country. Israel cites historical and Biblical links to the West Bank and Jerusalem and says Gush Etzion is one of the enclaves it intends to keep in any future peace deal.

Citing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ signing of UN human rights conventions, Israel said on Wednesday it was limiting its contacts with Palestinian officials, although Livni could continue to meet negotiators.

Announcing another sanction a day later, an Israeli official said Israel would deduct debt payments from tax transfers which the Palestinian Authority routinely receives, and limit the self-rule government’s deposits in Israeli banks.

For his part, Abbas has accused Israel of violating a commitment to release two dozen prisoners at the end of March, including Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis, when the negotiations resumed. This is the last group of 104 prisoners Israel pledged to free as a confidence-building measure.

BAGHDAD — Bombings targeting security forces in northern Iraq killed at least 16 people Sunday, authorities said, as the country prepares for a crucial election later this month.

In the deadliest attack, an explosives-laden parked car exploded as a joint Iraqi army and police patrol passed through a busy commercial area in Mosul, killing five civilians and five security personnel, a police officer said. He said the blast wounded 12.

A medical official confirmed the figures. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to release the information.

Mosul is located about 360 kilometres northwest of Baghdad.

Hours earlier, a suicide car bomber drove his vehicle into a security checkpoint in the northern town of Dibis, killing six people and wounding 15, police chief Col. Bestoon Rasheed said. Civilians were among the victims, but a breakdown of the casualties was not immediately available.

Dibis is located near the city of Kirkuk, 290 kilometres north of Baghdad.

Violence has escalated in Iraq over the past year, with 2013 seeing the highest death toll since the worst sectarian bloodletting in 2007, according to the United Nations figures. More than 8,800 people were killed in violence last year.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, but suicide bombings and well coordinated attacks are a hallmark of an Al Qaeda’s breakaway branch that operates in Iraq, known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Sunni Insurgent groups have escalated attacks across the country since last year in bid to undermine the Shiite-led government.

The attacks happened just weeks before parliamentary elections are scheduled to be held on April 30, the first such vote since US forces left Iraq. There will be no voting in parts of the western Anbar province, where security forces are clashing with Islamic militants and fighters who control the provincial capital, Ramadi, and nearly all of the nearby city of Fallujah.

TRIPOLI — Libya's interim prime minister handed his resignation to parliament on Sunday, just one month into the job, saying gunmen had tried to attack his family.

Abdullah Al Thinni's resignation adds to the growing chaos in Libya, where the government has struggled to control brigades of former rebels nearly three years after the fall of Muammar Qadhafi.

The General National Congress (GNC), the country's parliament, has not yet officially recognised Thinni's resignation and will decide what to do at its next session on Tuesday, a GNC spokesman said.

Thinni said he would stay in his post until the GNC selects a new prime minister.

“We are meeting now and we’re looking for someone to replace him,” Mohamed Ali Abdallah, head of the GNC’s planning and budget committee, told Reuters.

In his resignation letter, Thinni said he and his family had been victims of a “cowardly attack” and he could not “accept to see any violence because of my position”.

“I have decided therefore to present my apologies as I cannot accept this temporary position,” the letter said, without giving details about the incident.

Ahmed Lamin, a spokesman for the prime minister’s office, said no one had been hurt in the attack, which he described as a “near miss” outside Thinni’s family home.

Unenviable position

The post of interim prime minister is becoming difficult to fill. A suitable candidate must be able to bridge deep political divides in a parliament inter-laced with militia rivalries.

With no real national army, OPEC member Libya is struggling with its transition to democracy as the brigades of former rebels who once fought Qadhafi refuse to disarm and often challenge the state’s authority.

Thinni was appointed in March after the GNC voted out his predecessor, Ali Zeidan who had failed to end a standoff with rebels who were occupying vital oil ports.

The final blow was Zeidan’s failure to stop a tanker from illegally loading crude oil at one of the blocked ports.

Thinni’s government reached an agreement to reopen two ports, but the return of steady oil revenues is not a given.

The two largest ports, Es Sider and Ras Lanuf, remain closed pending negotiations over the division of the country’s oil wealth.

The attack on Thinni’s family is not the first time that a prime minister has been threatened.

Zeidan, who fled to Europe after he was removed from his post, was briefly abducted from his hotel by a militia last year. He often complained of being unable to govern because of political rivalries and pressure from militias.

DAMASCUS — The US ambassador to the United Nations said Sunday that reports of a poison gas attack in a rural village north of Damascus were so far "unsubstantiated", adding that the United States was trying to establish what really happened before it considers a response.

Both sides in Syria's civil war blamed each other for the alleged attack that reportedly injured scores of people Friday amid an ongoing international effort to rid the country of chemical weapons.

The details of what happened in Kfar Zeita, an opposition-held village in Hama province some 200 kilometres north of Damascus, remain murky. Online videos posted by rebel activists showed pale-faced men, women and children gasping for breath at what appeared to be a field hospital. They suggested an affliction by some kind of poison — and yet another clouded incident where both sides blame each other in a conflict that activists say has killed more than 150,000 people with no end in sight.

“We are trying to run this down,” said Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the United Nations, during an appearance Sunday on ABC’s “This Week”.

“So far it’s unsubstantiated, but we’ve shown, I think, in the past that we will do everything in our power to establish what has happened and then consider possible steps in response,” she said.

In the Syrian capital, Syrian President Bashar Assad said the conflict in Syria was shifting in the government’s favour.

“This is a turning point in the crisis, both militarily in terms of the army’s continuous achievements in the war against terror or socially in terms of national reconciliation and growing awareness of the true aims of the attack on the country,” state-run Syrian television quoted Assad as saying. He spoke to a group of students and teachers from Damascus University.

His comments follow a string of government triumphs against rebels, particularly around the Syrian capital. Assad’s forces also have struck local ceasefire agreements with the opposition in a number of neighbourhoods, where weary rebels have turned over their weapons in exchange for an easing of suffocating blockades.

Opposition groups, including the main Western-backed Syrian National Coalition, said the poison gas attack at Kfar Zeita hurt dozens of people, though it did not identify the gas used. State-run Syrian television blamed members of Al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front rebel group for the attack, saying they used chlorine gas to kill two people and injured more than 100. It did not say how it confirmed chlorine was used.

Chlorine, one of the most commonly manufactured chemicals in the US, is used to purify drinking water. But as a gas, it can be deadly.

The videos were reminiscent — albeit on a much smaller scale — of an August 21 chemical attack near the capital, Damascus, that killed hundreds of people.

The US and its allies blamed the Syrian government for that attack, which crossed a “red line” that President Barack Obama had said would bring harsh consequences. The attack nearly sparked Western air strikes before a negotiated diplomatic settlement saw Assad’s government agree to give up its chemical weapons. Damascus denied the charges and blamed rebels of staging the incident.

About half the weapons have been removed from Syria so far. The Syrian government has missed several deadlines, blaming the delays on security concerns.

The opposition also has claimed other, limited use of chemical weapons or poisonous gas attacks near Damascus in recent days.

Power’s comments came as heavy fighting raged Sunday across many parts of the country. In the war-shattered northern city of Aleppo, activists said at least 29 people were killed over the weekend.

The Britain-based Observatory for Human Rights said that at least 16 rebels were among those who died in the overnight combat. At least 13 civilians also were killed when government aircraft dropped barrel bombs on the city’s rebel-held districts.

Another activist group, the Syria-based Local Coordination Committees, said Assad’s warplanes launched fresh air strikes there on Sunday.

Aleppo, Syria’s largest urban centre and its one-time commercial hub, has been a key front in the civil war. The fighting has been in a stalemate for months.

Both activist groups also reported air strikes on rebel positions in a village in the oil-rich Deir Al Zour province near the Iraqi border. The observatory said the strikes killed at least four people and wounded scores.

KUWAIT — An opposition group in Kuwait, the Gulf Arab country with the most open political system, has set out a wide-ranging proposal for reform including parties, an elected government and greater powers for parliament.

The Opposition Coalition, formed last year by already existing groups of nationalists, Islamists, youths and liberals, issued a call at the weekend for major constitutional and legislative reforms to give elected officials more power.

Kuwait, a US ally and one of the world’s richest countries per capita, has avoided the severe unrest seen elsewhere in the Arab region. But tensions have persisted between parliament and the Cabinet, controlled by the ruling Al Sabah family, holding up reforms and investment.

Members of the family, which has ruled Kuwait since the 18th century, hold the top Cabinet posts. Emir Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah has the final say on state matters and has dissolved parliament several times since coming to power in 2006.

“The establishment of a full parliamentary system achieves the principle of ‘the sovereignty of the people, the source of all powers’,” the Opposition Coalition said on its new website www.opkuwait.com, citing the 1962 constitution.

The group said parliament should be able to work without the threat of dissolution, unless there are exceptional circumstances.

Kuwaitis should be allowed to form political parties and the leader of the group with the most votes in parliamentary elections should be able to form a government. This will make it more accountable to the public, it said.

At the moment, a prime minister picked by the emir forms a Cabinet. The prime minister is a member of the ruling family, as are the foreign, interior and defence ministers.

The reform plan is significant but should also be seen as a starting point for negotiations, said Shafeeq Ghabra, professor of political science at Kuwait University.

“I think this is the first time that you get a coalition of forces — which has an important element of representation at the level of the street and at the political level — that has come up with a document stating where it wants to go,” he said.

“It does represent a thinking that is emerging, regardless of the politics,” he said.

Although it has not had “Arab Spring” type unrest, Kuwait saw thousands take to the streets in 2012 to protest against electoral rule changes Sheikh Sabah made under his emergency powers. He said they were important for security and stability.

The youth-led protests included members of the long-established political opposition, which held seats in previous parliaments and formed a bloc to put pressure on the Cabinet.

The opposition boycotted elections after the emir made the changes and the protest movement faded. Protesters often complained the opposition lacked a clear political programme.

A foreigner has died from MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) while eight people including five health workers have been infected in the Saudi city of Jeddah, where the spread of the coronavirus among medics has sparked panic, Agence France-Presse reported.

The death of the 45-year-old man, whose nationality has not been disclosed, brings the nationwide toll in the world’s most-affected country to 68.

The health ministry late Saturday announced the death of the man and said five health workers — two women and three men — and three other people had been infected by the virus in Jeddah.

The announcement came days after panic over the spread of the virus among medical staff led to the closure of the emergency room at the city’s main public hospital.

Health Minister Abdullah Al Rabiah visited hospitals in Jeddah on Saturday in a bid to calm residents.

The virus was initially concentrated in the eastern region but has now spread across more areas.

Meanwhile, Yemen reported its first case of the deadly MERS coronavirus on Sunday in a further spread of the deadly strain in the Middle East two years after its outbreak in neighbouring Saudi Arabia, Reuters reported.

“Medical personnel have recorded one case of the coronavirus in Sanaa and the victim is a Yemeni man who works as an aeronautics engineer,” the semi-official Al Thawra newspaper quoted Public Health Minister Ahmed Al Ansi as saying.

“The ministry is working in effective cooperation with the World Health Organisation to confront this virus, and is in direct and constant communication with all hospitals to receive information on any other suspected cases,” Ansi said.

The MERS virus is considered a deadlier but less-transmissible cousin of the SARS virus that erupted in Asia in 2003 and infected 8,273 people, 9 per cent of whom died.

Experts are still struggling to understand MERS, for which there is no known vaccine.

A study has said the virus has been “extraordinarily common” in camels for at least 20 years and may have been passed directly from the animals to humans, according to AFP.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon on Sunday approved the return of Jewish settlers to a contested house in the West Bank city of Hebron, his office said.

The supreme court ruled last month that settlers were the lawful owners of the building in the heart of the occupied Palestinian city, ending a legal dispute lasting nearly seven years.

“Following the court decision... Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon today [Sunday] approved habitation of the house,” his office said in a statement.

It added that the area military instructor had been told to allow “a limited number of families to the house”.

The Peace Now settlement watchdog condemned what it called a “sad decision from the ministry of defence to approve and support the most radical rightwing settlers and approve them a new settlement in Hebron.”

The ministry “and the government showed again that they have no interest in the two-state solution and its negotiation”, its spokesman Lior Amihai told AFP, referring to US-sponsored negotiations aimed at a two-state peace settlement.

The Rajabis, a Palestinian family, has for years said its four-storey building had been taken over fraudulently by Israeli settlers.

A lower court in 2012 accepted their claim, ruling that the settlers’ assertion that they had legally purchased the property “does not hold water”.

The supreme court overturned that judgement on appeal.

The building is near a contested holy site known to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque and to Jews as the Cave of the Patriarchs in a tightly controlled Israeli enclave where many streets are off-limits to Palestinian cars.

The settlers were evacuated in 2008, and the supreme court ruling said they would not be allowed to move back in without defence ministry approval.

The flashpoint city of Hebron, home to nearly 200,000 Palestinians, also comprises some 80 settler housing units in the centre of town for about 700 Jews who live under Israeli army protection.

BOUYA OMAR, Morocco — A thin mist hangs in the air as a handful of troubled souls wander aimlessly around the Bouya Omar mausoleum in central Morocco, the occasional chilling cry rising from behind its walls.

These are Morocco’s “possessed” — from violent schizophrenics to hard drug users — who are believed to be tormented by evil spirits and whose relatives bring them here to await deliverance.

But many are left wondering exactly what goes on inside the sanctuary of the 16th century Moroccan saint, situated in a small town named after him on the plains east of Marrakesh.

Bouya Omar’s followers claim the mentally ill are healed by the saint’s supernatural powers, but rights groups allege gross mistreatment of those taken there, with one former inmate describing months of “hell”.

Activists say hundreds of people have been kept in chains here, sometimes starved and beaten, making the place a byword for cruelty and highlighting the stigma attached to mental illness in Morocco.

Their numbers cannot be verified and officials are reluctant to speak about what they say is a “sensitive subject”.

Mohammed, a former drug addict from Tangiers, is adamant that he was subjected to brutal treatment seven years ago.

Taken to Bouya Omar by his brother in 2006 to be cured of his “demon”, he says he was shackled and beaten repeatedly, given barely enough food to survive and robbed of the little money he had.

“I lived in hell for a year,” Mohammed told AFP, adding that the experience had left him partially blind in one eye.

He says his brother eventually returned and “saved” him.

Damning reports about mistreatment, including one presented by a human rights organisation to the UN group on arbitrary detention visiting Morocco in December, prompted the health minister to announce that he would close Bouya Omar immediately — if only he could.

“I’m going to do everything I can to get this centre closed. Unfortunately the decision is not for the ministry of health,” Hossein El Ouardi said in January.

Popular beliefs 

The issue touches a sensitive nerve running through Moroccan society.

Popular beliefs abound in the Muslim country, about good and bad genies (“jnun”) capable of affecting one’s daily life, and the power over them of marabouts, holy men like Bouya Omar, whose ubiquitous white tombs are credited with the same supernatural forces.

Over the past decade, sociologists say, King Mohammed VI has encouraged such popular Islamic beliefs, commonly linked in Morocco to the world of healing, partly as a way of countering extremist ideology.

Despite the human rights violations now associated with it, the cult of Bouya Omar falls squarely within this tradition.

The saint’s modern-day followers, who embody his authority and profit handsomely from the money paid for healing, mediate between the “patients” and the jnun believed to have possessed them, in rituals focused around the tomb and aimed at casting out the evil spirits.

“The health minister cannot close Bouya Omar because it serves a political purpose and exists for other social and cultural reasons that are deeply rooted in Moroccan society,” says author and academic Zakaria Rhani.

A source at the ministry of religious affairs admitted Bouya Omar is a “very complex and sensitive subject”.

“The patient is imprisoned in a way to protect him, and to restrain this force, which is a kind of blind force, to exorcise the spirit,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“We leave people there because we can’t look after them. But it’s a traditional system and it has to change.”

‘Crime against humanity’ 

The difficulty of properly looking after the patients, by getting them treatment at psychiatric facilities run by qualified personnel, stems from the backward state of Morocco’s mental health sector after decades of neglect, medical experts say.

Jallal Toufiq, head doctor at the Arrazi Mental Hospital in Rabat’s twin city Sale, says there are only 400 psychiatrists in a country of 33 million people, while some of the psychiatric institutions are in a “very advanced state of disrepair”.

The US-trained doctor describes the practises at Bouya Omar as a “crime against humanity”, lamenting the “extremely negative attitude towards mental illness” in Morocco, which he mainly attributes to poor eduction.

“The level of awareness in the general population is so low that a lot of people tend to interpret their syndromes, their delusions and anxieties, as a curse, as something that has nothing to do with medicine.

“So they seek healings in marabouts, and the problem is that they come to see us long after, when they’re in bad shape.”

Mohammed Oubouli, an activists with the Moroccan Association of Human Rights in Attaouia, a town near Bouya Omar, has campaigned for years to get what he calls “Morocco’s Guantanamo” closed.

“We’re not against what the people believe; they can believe what they like. What bothers us is the suffering of those brought here.”

DUBAI — Iran on Saturday rejected a US decision to deny a visa for its newly appointed ambassador to the United Nations, pledging to take up the case directly with the world body in a dispute that has reopened old wounds dating to the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The United States, which hosts the United Nations, said Iran's candidate Hamid Abutalebi was unacceptable given his role in a 444-day crisis in which radical Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage.

President Barack Obama had come under strong domestic pressure not to allow Abutalebi into the United States to take up his position in New York, raising concerns that the dispute would disrupt delicate negotiations between Tehran and six world powers including Washington over Iran's nuclear programme.

"We have no replacement for Mr. Abutalebi and we will pursue the matter via legal mechanisms envisioned at the United Nations," Abbas Araghchi, a senior foreign ministry official, was quoted by Iran's official IRNA news agency as saying.

“Based on an agreement with the United Nations, America is bound to act according to its international commitments,” Araghchi said, as quoted by IRNA. The United Nations said it had no comment at this time on the US decision.

American law allows the Washington government to bar UN diplomats who are considered national security threats. But Obama’s potentially precedent-setting step could open the United States to criticism that it is wielding its position as host nation to improperly exert political influence.

Araghchi is also a top negotiator in Iran’s talks with big powers on defusing a stand-off over its disputed nuclear activity. Iran has said Washington’s rejection of Abutalebi will not affect the talks, whose next round is set for
May 13.

Abutalebi says he served solely as a periodic translator for the Islamist students who seized the US embassy hostages, and he has since evolved into a moderate figure favouring, like President Hassan Rouhani, a thaw in Iran’s ties with the West.

Since an uproar among former US hostages and US lawmakers over Abutalebi broke out, Tehran has steadfastly stuck by its choice, describing him as a seasoned diplomat who has served in various capacities in Western countries.

‘Capable, rational diplomat’

“Dr Abutalebi is one of the most capable, experienced and rational diplomats in Iran,” Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told IRNA. He served as Iran’s UN envoy for eight years before taking his current job last year following Rouhani’s election on a pledge to ease Iran’s international isolation.

In comments posted on Facebook late on Friday, Abutalebi said the US move against him set a “wrong new precedent”.

Vahi Ahmadiah, a hardline conservative cleric who heads the Iranian parliament’s foreign affairs and national security committee, said: “America has no right to inject its issues into an international matter. It has shown [here] its hostile nature again. It uses every chance to hit out at the Islamic republic.”

It was unclear whether the matter might play into the hands of hardliners in Iran’s unwieldy power structure. They are keen to discredit Rouhani’s campaign to improve long-hostile relations with the West, especially Washington, but have been held in check for now by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iranian officials privately insist that the dispute should not be allowed to derail diplomacy aimed at a nuclear deal with world powers — crucial to Rouhani’s promise to win Iran relief from punitive economic sanctions.

The nuclear negotiations have also yielded unprecedented bilateral discussions between Iran and the United States.

After former hostages objected to Abutalebi, members of Congress jumped to pass legislation this week banning him, seeing the issue as a chance to look tough on Iran after a new sanctions bill stalled in the Senate early this year.

Many Americans retain bitter feelings about Iran over the hostage crisis and many members of Congress, even Obama’s fellow Democrats, are deeply sceptical about Tehran’s intentions even under the pragmatist Rouhani. They treated Iran’s selection of Abutalebi as a deliberate rebuke of the United States.