June 2009 – Shahram Amiri, a university researcher working for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, goes missing during a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. Iran’s Press TV said Amiri was a researcher at Tehran’s Malek Ashtar University.
September 2009 – The IAEA says Iran, three months after Amiri’s disappearance, disclosed the existence of its second uranium enrichment site, near the central holy Shi’ite city of Qom, further heightening tension over the Islamic state’s atomic activities. Construction of the plant began in 2006.
October 2009 – Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki says Iran has found documents that prove U.S. involvement in the disappearance.
December 2009 – Iran accuses Saudi Arabia of handing over the scientist to the United States.
March 2010 – Media reports that Amiri defected as part of a long-planned operation to get him to leave Iran and resettle in the United States.
– An ABC report says Amiri has been extensively debriefed since his defection and says he helped to confirm U.S. intelligence assessments about the Iranian nuclear programme.
June 2010 – Iran’s state television shows a video of what it says is the missing nuclear scientist declaring he was kidnapped and taken to the United States where he was “tortured.”
– “I was kidnapped from Medina in a joint operation by the American intelligence service … and Saudi Arabia,” Amiri says, speaking in Farsi, in footage which showed him sitting behind a computer wearing headphones. Amiri says in the video he is in Arizona and that the footage was taken on April 5.
– Shortly after that footage, a second video appears on the Internet, also purporting to be Amiri, in which he says he is actually studying in the United States.
– Iran summons the Swiss ambassador in Tehran and hands over documents which it says shows the missing scientist has been kidnapped by the United States.
– On June 29, in a third video, a man describing himself as Amiri said he had fled from U.S. “agents” and was in hiding, urging human rights groups to help him to return to Iran.
July 2010 – Iran has sent to U.S. authorities more documents about the disappearance of the scientist, demanding his release, the foreign ministry says on July 3.
– “The documents about Shahram Amiri’s abduction by the CIA have been delivered to the Swiss embassy as the preservers of America’s interests,” according to Iran’s IRNA.
– The scientist has taken refuge in the Iranian interests section of Pakistan’s embassy in Washington, a Pakistan foreign ministry official says.
ROUNDUP: Prosecutor accuses Hezbollah of plotting attacks in Egypt
Cairo – Egypt’s public prosecutor on Wednesday accused Hezbollah of sending operatives to Egypt to carry out attacks in the country and to smuggle weapons and money to Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
In a statement released Wednesday evening Abdel-Magid Mohammed accused Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah of dispatching agents to Egypt during Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip.
The militants were to recruit local agents to conduct attacks, to incite the people and the armed forces to revolt, to spy on Egypt and to smuggle weapons and cash to Hamas in the Gaza Strip, he said.
The statement added that the prosecutor had received “certain information” from Egypt’s domestic intelligence service, State Security Investigations, that a Hezbollah cell had rented apartments overlooking the Suez Canal in order to spy on traffic through the canal.
It also accused them of spying on resorts in Sinai, and renting rooms in fashionable districts where Hezbollah agents held training workshops on spreading Shiite thought in Egypt.
Hezbollah’s spokesman in Beirut did not answer repeated requests for comment from the German Press Agency dpa on Wednesday evening.
Earlier on Wednesday morning, two sources in the Egyptian Interior Ministry and an Islamist lawyer told dpa that State Security had detained 49 people – including 41 Egyptians, seven Palestinians with Israeli passports, and one Lebanese man – in December on suspicion of smuggling weapons and money to Hamas.
A spokesman from the Israeli Embassy in Cairo told dpa the embassy was working with the Egyptian authorities to find out more information about the detentions.
Montasser al-Zayat, a former member of the Islamist group Gamaa al-Islamiya and a former associate of deputy al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, on Wednesday told dpa that the brother of the Lebanese detainee had asked him to represent the detainees, but that he had not had access to them.
Egypt’s public prosecutor on Wednesday evening said that Egypt’s High State Security prosecutor was interrogating “around 49 suspects,” that the Lawyer’s Syndicate had been duly notified of the men’s detention and that the prosecutor had received no petition from a lawyer seeking access to the detainees.
“Investigations revealed that Nasrallah had dispatched the agents after his speech … and that he had planned to incite the people and military forces to rebel against the regime,” Egypt’s public prosecutor said in the statement, claiming that the arrests had foiled Nasrallah’s plans.
“If the people took to the streets by the millions, could the police kill millions of Egyptians?” Nasrallah asked in a televised address at the beginning of Israel’s offensive in Gaza in December. “People of Egypt, you must open this border by the force of your chests.” (dpa)