Iran believes the United States is holding a former deputy defense minister who disappeared in 2007 and 10 other Iranian nationals, according to a list carried by the semi-official Mehr news agency Wednesday. On Tuesday, the Iranian Foreign Ministry's spokesman said 11 Iranians were being detained in the United States, naming only the missing scientist, Shahram Amiri. US State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, speaking to reporters in Washington, declined to comment on the situation. The list on Mehr also named former deputy minister Ali Reza Asgari and included a former ambassador to Jordan. Iran and the United States have had no diplomatic relationship for three decades and are embroiled in a long-running row over Tehran's nuclear program. Iran's Foreign Ministry was “seriously following” the cases of the 11 Iranians held in the United States through legal and diplomatic channels, Mehr said. In 2007, Iran's police chief suggested that Asgari, who disappeared in Turkey that year, had been kidnapped by Western intelligence services. Israel and the United States have denied any involvement in the disappearance. Meanwhile, President Ahmadinejad said Wednesday that Iran's plan to build 10 new uranium enrichment plants was not aimed at confronting the UN atomic watchdog, which censured Tehran last month, state television website reported. He also said Iran would continue to build the new plants, adding that sites for five of the 10 units had been finalized. “The news that we announced (about the new plants) was not to confront the board of the agency, as we had assigned the (Iranian) atomic energy organization to locate several sites (for the new plants) months ago,” the state television website quoted him as saying. “We recently even asked them (Iran's atomic agency) about the delay” in identifying the sites, Ahmadinejad said, adding that Iran has always “acted on its decisions, which are definite.” ‘UN observatory is spy station' Iran accused world powers of trying to spy on the country with a newly built UN seismic monitoring station near its border to detect tremors from nuclear explosions. Construction of the station was completed last week in neighboring Turkmenistan, a few miles from the Iranian border. It's one of 337 such stations worldwide that detect seismic activity set off by weak blasts and even shock waves from nuclear experiments. Abolfazl Zohrehvand, an adviser to Iran's nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, said the international treaty that allows for setting up such observatories is an “espionage treaty.”
