Iran candidate sharpens attack on Soviet invasion

Iran's Finance Minister, in the strongest Iranian attack to date on Russian intervention in Afghanistan, has accused the Soviet Union of wanting to divide Iran and push on to the Indian Ocean. In a campaign speech published Thursday by the official Pars News Agency, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, a front-runner in the campaign for the presidency, said: "They [the Soviets] want us to be divided rather than united so that they can capture the divided parts, as they did with Afghanistan, and reach the waters of the Indian Ocean."