Tehran escalates war of plaques with Berlin

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Tehran city council will erect plaques denouncing
Germany as a supplier of chemical weapons to Iraq, the council said
Thursday, in retaliation for a plaque in Berlin accusing Iran of
killing four Kurds 12 years ago.

City council official Mehdi Chamran said the two plaques, one of which
will be placed in the same street as the German embassy in Tehran,
will commemorate the thousands of Iranians killed by chemical gas
attacks in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.

The official IRNA news agency quoted him as saying Germany had been a
key supplier of chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein.

"All the country's officials as well as the Iranian people saw Germany
as the culprit for Saddam's crimes and will never forget the crimes of
Germany during the Second World War," Chamran said.

He called a "joke" the installation Tuesday of a memorial plaque in
front of the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin where four Iranian Kurdish
dissidents were gunned down in 1992.

The Berlin plaque attributed the attack to Tehran, a verdict shared by
a German court in 1997.

Iran has always denied any involvement in the deaths. Iran's Foreign
Ministry summoned German Ambassador Baron Paul von Maltzahn Wednesday
and voiced its "strong objection" to the erection of the Berlin
plaque