Guardian hack admits making up story that demonised Iran

Saeed Kamali Deghani’s 2010 Guardian article about a woman executed in Iran played a significant role in setting the anti-Iran narrative of the following years. Titled “Iranian facing stoning speaks: ‘It’s because I’m a woman’”, Deghani’s “exclusive interview” relayed Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani’s accusation that the Iranian court was lying about charges of adultery and murder. The article said that the charges were made up.

But in fact, it was Deghani’s article that was made up. Completely. And now — he says in the hope of forgiveness from God — he has admitted it:

Mina Ahadi is a communist Iranian exile who serves on the committee of Atheist Alliance International. She presumably has little reason to want to help the image of Iran’s Islamic Republic. But she has posted a screenshot of Deghani’s confession. In the accompanying caption, she says that Deghani had already confessed to her in 2010 — and that he had begged her not to expose him in case he was sacked and sent back to Iran.

And she shows little sympathy, advising him to calm down now that he is “in the arms of the executioners”:

You pleaded and begged so desperately that I would not tell your superiors at The Guardian that the interview with Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani was fabricated and a lie. You were terrified that you would be deported and that the executioners’ regime would execute you.

Saeed Kamali Dehghan was a journalist who, unfortunately, had learned the art of lying and fraud from some journalists who suddenly move from Fars, Tasnim, IRIB, Etemad, Hamshahri, and similar outlets to supposedly reputable international media or Iran International, and then begin reporting for them.

He has now returned to Iran, and presumably, after being debriefed and having his information extracted, he is helping the regime and conducting smear campaigns against the people.

A few days ago, he announced that the interview with Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani published in The Guardian—in which he claimed to have been in contact with Sakineh while she was in prison—was a lie. Meanwhile, the regime’s thugs and hooligans are now shouting that the reports about Sakineh’s stoning sentence were completely false and that stoning was not at all common in Iran.

My response to this man who fled London and has now joined the Islamic regime is this:

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Sir, on the very day The Guardian published the interview, I called you and asked why you were writing lies. No one except me was in contact with Sajjad, Sakineh’s son. That was precisely why journalists from all over the world, including you, contacted them through us.

And you told me that if I reported this to The Guardian, you might be fired, deported, and executed.

You yourself told me in detail how you had secretly made a film about Neda Agha-Soltan, and you described the details of your escape from Iran. You said, with fear and terror, that if you were deported, you would be executed. That is why I neither told The Guardian nor made the matter public.

Now that you are in the arms of the executioners and bloodshed perpetrators, it would be better for you to calm down and stop struggling to justify yourself any further, because you are only making yourself complicit in some of their crimes.

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The Guardian has not deleted its article. The UK government -—and its media allies — continue to support the illegal and murderous US-Israel war on Iran, even as Iran’s defence threatens to plunge the globe into economic ruin and Trump escalates sanctions and threatens nuclear strikes because he is unable to defeat it.

UK ‘mainstream’ media are not neutral and should not be trusted unless their claims can be independently verified.

Featured image provided via author

By Skwawkbox

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