Tehran, Iran, August 9
By Mehdi Sepahvand - Trend:
Twelve Iranian members of parliament have resigned from a plan to question Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.
The MPs had planned to question Zarif about what they called national and regional issues, ISNA news agency reported August 9.
They had intended to ask questions about issues such as the Foreign Ministry's not pursuing the case of Iranian diplomats who had been kidnapped in Yemen.
An Iranian diplomat held hostage in Yemen since 2013 returned home to Tehran on March 5 amid conflicting accounts of how he was freed from his unidentified abductors.
Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian said then that an Iranian intelligence operation in Yemen rescued Noor Ahmad Nikbakht, an administrative official at Tehran's embassy in Sanaa.
Nikbakht was on his way to work from his home in the diplomatic quarter of the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, on July 21, 2013, when unidentified gunmen blocked the road, forced him out of his vehicle and abducted him.
In January 2014, another staff member at the Iranian Embassy in Sanaa, Abolqasem Asadi, was gunned down by gunmen outside the Iranian ambassador's residence in the Yemeni capital. The assailants first tried to kidnap the Iranian diplomat, but when they faced resistance, opened fire on him. The diplomat who was seriously injured passed away in hospital.