Beirut denies moving abducted Iranians

Lebanese Interior Minister Marwan Charbel said that the ministry has no information regarding the move of the five abducted Iranian engineers from Syria to Lebanon. Iranian news reported, however, that the five men are detained in Northern Lebanon, making the abduction incident a mystery. Citing an unnamed "tribal figure", the Iranian state satellite channel Press TV reported that "five Iranian electrical engineers, who were abducted by revolutionary armed gunmen while traveling to an electric power plant in the Syrian city of Homs, on December 21, have been relocated to northern Lebanon, by their captors. In the mean time, an official at the Iranian power company operating in Syria said that videotaped statements from the captives, released this week by a unit of the rebel Free Syrian Army, in which the men said that they were soldiers and had taken part in the violent suppression of dissent in Homs, were false and had been made under duress. "It is very clear that they were under pressure when they made these statements", he added, explaining that being held hostages can force them to make any designed statements. Captors who spoke to a Reuters correspondent in Beirut, via Skype, insisted that the five men were soldiers, and said that they would not be released unless the Syrian government ceases its military operations in Homs and frees a senior officer who was arrested after he defected to the opposition. However, in the video posted online by a unit of "the Free Syrian Army" known as "Al Farouq Brigade", one of the Iranians said that the group had been "involved in suppressing and shooting Syrians civilians,” and killed several people, including women and children, in the city of Homs." “We urge Iran’s supreme military leader Khomeini to order the Iranian military personnel who suppress the Syrians to be repatriated from Syria, so we can also return home,” he added. In the same context, AlJazeera reported that the names given by the men in the video matched the names of the five Iranians who were abducted in December.