I always thought they probably had the wrong picture the first time.
Reader comment on item: Ahmadinejad - Hostage Taker?

Submitted by Sammy Finkelman (United States), Nov 15, 2006 at 16:48

Soon after his election as president of Iran, on June 25, 2005, pictures of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad emerged showing him as a hostage-taker. An Associated Press photograph showed a man looking very much like a younger version of today's Ahmadinejad holding a blind-folded man, apparently five days after the U.S. embassy in Tehran was seized on November 4, 1979.

A new picture located by Kommersant re-opens this issue, providing new evidence that Ahmadinejad was not some backroom political type but in fact was a automatic gun-wielding hostage-taker. The person pictured here differs from the one in the Associated Press photograph

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I always thought that what made the most sense was that they probably had the wrong picture the first time. And I also thouight it was very likely this was on purpose - somebody in Iran leaked that first picture so it could be plausibly denied that Ahmadinejad was a hostge taker (Standard top level Mafia, criminal defense lawyer, and Clinton tactics)

This is probably the right picture. Now I don't believe this suddenly just showed up in a Russian publication.

The only question is - does Ahmadinejad really look 25 years younger here? I can't really judge that. If he looks more like 35 years there then it might be a forgery.

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