TEHRAN, July 1 (Xinhuanet) -- Three leading hostage-takers denied Friday the alleged role of Iran's president-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Iran, the official IRNA news agency reported.

    In November 1979, five months after Iran's Islamic Revolution, a group of students, self-proclaimed to be members of "Students Following the Path of Imam", took over the US embassy in Tehran and held 52 staff hostage for 444 days.

    The incident led Washington to break ties with Tehran in 1980.

    In an interview with the Washington Times newspaper, several former American hostages said they remembered Ahmadinejad, who won Iran's presidential election on June 24, took part in the hostage-taking.

    But Abbas Abdi, Mohsen Mirdamadi and Hamid Reza Jalaeipour, who led the occupation of the US embassy in Tehran and the seizure of its staff, were quoted as saying that the reports on Ahmadinejad's involvement were not true.

    Abdolhossein Rouholamini, another hostage-taker, said that no student from University of Science and Technology, at which Ahmadinejad was studying at that time, participated in the hostage-taking.

    "The hostage-takers were the students from Tehran University, Sharif University of Technology, Polytechnic University and National University," Rouholamini stressed. Enditem