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An international trade union has condemned the disappearance of Iranian union leader Mansour Osanlou, who has reportedly been abducted in Tehran. Mr Osanlou’s wife told the BBC her husband was pulled from a bus by unidentified men on Tuesday evening. The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) has written to Iran’s president to protest. Mr Osanlou, head of Tehran’s transport workers’ union, spent most of 2006 in prison for running a strike in 2005.

As the director of the Union of Workers of the Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company, Mr Osanlou was first detained in December 2005 for organising a walk-out by bus drivers. The drivers then planned another strike in January 2006 in response to his detention and to demand recognition of their trade union activities. The Iranian government responded by pre-emptively detaining hundreds of drivers, including several union organisers. All were later released, but Mr Osanlou was detained in Tehran’s Evin prison for several months before being freed on bail. His union is not recognised by the Iranian government, but it is the first independent Iranian trade unions to be affiliated to an international organisation, says the BBC’s Pam O’Toole. Mr Osanlou received a standing ovation when he spoke at a recent conference in Europe. The ITF said there was strong reason to believe Mr Osanlou was being held by the Iranian authorities. The organisation’s Secretary General, David Cockroft, says Mr Osanlou has frequently been badly treated by Iranian authorities. “He’s been imprisoned about three times now. He has been beaten up on arrest, [and] he has been the subject of harassment by the security apparatus inside Iran simply for being the president of one of the first independent genuine trade unions which have been established in Iran. “All of us are behind him now and demand his release and the reining in of the bullies and thugs who are hounding him.” Iran has made no comment about Mr Osanlou’s disappearance.

Source: BBC

Iran’s judiciary has launched new investigations into the cases of two detained Iranian Americans charged with endangering national security, citing fresh evidence, a spokesman said Tuesday. The investigations into Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh have been broadened, said judiciary spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi. Prosecutors “obtained new evidence in line with the charges brought against them. The case is under investigation,” he told reporters, without elaborating.

Esfandiari, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Middle East program director, was jailed in early May. Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant with George Soros’ Open Society Institute, is also held on security charges. The Wilson Center said later Tuesday it “rejected as totally without merit the suggestion that Iran has discovered new evidence that Haleh Esfandiari … acted against Iran’s national security.” Esfandiari has been held in solitary confinement in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison since her arrest and continues to be denied access to her family, lawyers and international organizations like the Red Cross, the Wilson Center said. “We are deeply disturbed by these new reports from Iran, and by the fact that Haleh remains in Evin prison despite not one shred of truth to any of the charges brought against her,” said Lee H. Hamilton, the Wilson Center’s director. “We are gravely concerned about Haleh’s physical and mental state,” he said. Tajbakhsh, 45, is also being held on security charges. “In the two months since his arrest, the Iranian authorities have offered nothing to substantiate any allegations of wrongdoing” by Tajbakhsh, the Open Society Institute said in a statement. “These vague allusions to new evidence in the case against him are equally unfounded,” it said. Two other Iranian Americans, Parnaz Azima, a journalist who works for the U.S.-funded Radio Farda, and Ali Shakeri, a founding board member of the University of California, Irvine, Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, face similar charges. While Shakeri is in jail, Azima is free but barred from leaving the country. Family members, colleagues and employers of the four deny the allegations. Esfandiari’s husband, Shaul Bakhash, has rejected the charges against his wife as “totally without foundation.” The Iranian Intelligence Ministry accuses Esfandiari and her organization of trying to create a “soft revolution” in Iran to topple the hard-line Islamic regime, similar to the bloodless revolutions that ended communist rule in eastern Europe. International human rights groups, including the New York-based Human Rights Watch, have expressed deep concern for the health of the detained Americans — especially Esfandiari, who is 67. Esfandiari was visiting her 93-year-old mother in December when three masked men with knives stole her luggage and passport as she headed to the airport, the Wilson Center says. Source: The Associated Press