Word: benyahia
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...Algerian team under Foreign Minister Mohammed Benyahia were acting as intermediaries. The Iranians, who spoke Persian, would talk only with the Algerians, who spoke French. Any question or proposal of mine had to be translated twice as it went from Washington to Algiers to Tehran; the answers and counterproposals had to come back over the same slow route...
Iran immediately blamed Iraq for the incident, calling it "a calculated plot" to sabotage Benyahia's mission. As evidence, Tehran cited recorded exchanges between the Iranian control tower at Tabriz and the plane's crew. Three times, according to the Iranians, Tabriz warned the Algerians that two Iraqi fighter jets were in the vicinity and told the pilot to turn back toward Ankara. Later Iranian officials also claimed that fragments of a Soviet-built Iraqi air-to-air missile had been retrieved from the wreckage, which was found in mountainous Iranian territory close to the Turkish border...
...Algerian team was dispatched to the scene to investigate the crash, the soft-spoken Benyahia, a prominent figure in Algerian politics ever since the country's struggle for independence from France, was mourned as a senseless casualty of the conflict. Said Algerian President Bendjedid Chadli: "What makes it more painful is that he died while embarking on a noble peace mission...
...assistance was supposedly intended to help ease Egypt back into the Arab fold, by which it has been ostracized since the Camp David agreement. But in spite of the losses incurred, neither side seems ready to make the concessions necessary to resolve the conflict. With the tragic end of Benyahia's mission last week, peace seemed as distant as ever...
DIED. Mohammed Seddik Benyahia, 50, Algeria's astute Foreign Minister and a key negotiatior in the release of the 52 Americans held hostage by Iran; in a plane crash under mysterious circumstances while on a peace-seeking mission to end the Iraq-Iran war (see WORLD); near the Iran-Turkey border. The ascetic-looking Benyahia was a guerrilla fighter and a founding father of the Algerian revolution of 1954-62. In 1979 he became Foreign Minister and played a decisive role in the postwar reconciliation between his country and France. After mediating the hostage crisis, he formally handed over...