Yanks Holding 36 Iranians, Tehran Regime Charges

WASHINGTON — Iran's ambassador in Baghdad has accused America of having 36 Iranians in custody, a far higher number than previous counts of detained Iranians provided by American spokesmen. In an interview with ABC News in Baghdad yesterday, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, alluding to President Bush's decision last month to target Iranian supply lines and saboteurs, said America is holding six Iranian diplomats and an additional 30 Iranian nationals.

The AP reported this news yesterday:
Among the evidence the administration planned to present are weapons that were seized over time in U.S.-led raids on caches around Iraq, said one military official. Other evidence includes documents captured when U.S.-led forces raided an Iranian office Jan. 11 in Irbil, a city in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq about 220 miles north of Baghdad, this official said.In that raid, the U.S. captured five Iranians. They included the operations chief and other members of Iran's elite Quds Force, which is accused of arming and training Iraqi militants. Tehran said it was a government liaison office and called for the release of the five, along with compensation for damages.The dossier also details Iran's role in providing Iraqi fighters with the "explosively formed penetrator" devices that can pierce the armor of Abrams tanks with nearly molten-hot charges. One intelligence official said the U.S. is "fairly comfortable" that it knows with some precision the origin of those Iranian-made explosives.

The New York Times offered more description on the deadly weaponry and assistance that Iran is providing the insurgents in Iraq.

Today the Associated Press released this update on the Iranian connections:

During the briefing, the officer said that one of six Iranians detained in January in a raid on an office in the northern city of Irbil was the operational commander of the Quds Brigade, a unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that trains and equips Shiite militants abroad. He was identified as Mohsin Chizari, who was apprehended after slipping back into Iraq after a 10-month absence, the officer said. The Iranians were caught trying to flush documents down the toilet, he said. Bags of their hair were found during the raid, indicating they had tried to change their appearance, he added.

h/t:gatewaypundit