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Businessman guilty of stealing priceless pages
India's News.Net Friday 21st November, 2008
A wealthy businessman who stole pages from books in the British Library and Bodleian Library has pleaded guilty to theft.
Farhad Hakimzadeh, 60, of Knightsbridge in London removed text and illustrations out of books from both the libraries in London and Oxford.
Hakimzadeh, who has himself published several books, is on the board of directors of the UK's Iranian Heritage Foundation.
He would replace pages that were missing or damaged in his own books with leaves cut from library copies of the same texts.
The works dated from as far back as the 16th Century and all concerned European engagement with the Middle East.
It is believed Hakimzadeh mutilated 150 of the library's most precious items.
The British Library has launched its own civil proceedings against Hakimzadeh.
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Aydin 11-24-08, 09:57 AM |
Businessman guilty of stealing priceless pages
It is obvious that Mr. Hakimzadeh has mutilated those manuscripts, because he wanted to eliminate some part of the history of this region which he obviously does not like it! It is clear that it was not a simple robbery! The most important thing which should be investigated in this court is that “what was his motivation for this mutilation?” “Which part of the history he wanted to mutilation?”
I am one of Iranian Azerbaijanis, a Turkic-speaking minority in Iran, which has no ethnic rights in Iran even the education of our mother language in the schools, is forbidden. I guess that one of his motivations could be the elimination of the parts of Iranian history which shows that Turkic-speaking Azeris were living in Azerbaijan from long time ago. Because the Persian chauvinists claim that Azerbaijan was not the land of Turkic-speaking Azeris in the past and only in a few centuries ago, the language of the people has been changed from an unknown Indo-European language (Claimed to be called as “Azeri”!?) to a Turkish dialect of Azeri. They use this unacceptable theory to assimilate Azeri people to change their language to Persian (Farsi)!? I suppose that he wanted to eliminate the traces of presence of the Turkic-speaking people in Iran from the old manuscripts. His aim was to continue that wrong claim against Azeris that you were not in reality Turkic-speaking people but Turkic-empires changed your language by force!? They continue this wrong politic for near one century to assimilate Azerbaijanis in Iran because we are the largest minorities in Iran (at least 25% of the population of the country are Azeris).
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