The United States will not grant a visa to Tehran’s newly appointed UN ambassador, Hamid Aboutalebi, over his links to the 1979 US hostage crisis, the White House said Friday.
“We have informed the United Nations and Iran that we will not issue a visa for Aboutalebi,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.
Hamid Abutalebi was one of the masterminds behind the US Embassy takeover in Tehran in November 1979. He also took part in interviews conducted with various members of the hostage taking teams, specifically on March 9th with the Khabar Online website when he said, “I was an interpreter for those taking over the embassy”!, trying to whitewash his record.
Abutalebi, then the Iranian regime’s ambassador in Italy, played a key and direct role in recon, planning and actually carrying out the assassination of Mohammad Hossein Naghdi on 16 March 1993, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, NCRI representative in Italy.