Afshin Rattansi has returned to London after being one of a handful of international journalists living in the Islamic Republic of Iran. He interviewed President Ahmadinejad in January.

About Afshin

Afshin Rattansi has for two decades worked in flagship broadcast and print media around the world, at the BBC, CNN International, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera Arabic and Britain’s Channel 4. He launched a TV channel in the Middle East in 1998 and has recently returned to London from Tehran, where he has been living for a year, anchoring and developing Iran’s 24 hour English-language international TV station, Press TV. He interviewed President Ahmadinejad, last month.

Afshin has reported on events across Africa and Latin America as well as the Middle East and Europe, covering the fall of the Berlin Wall, the resignation of Margaret Thatcher and working on the first UK primetime documentary to analyse human rights abuses by Saddam Hussein. Returning from the Middle East in 2002, he went on to produce for  the BBC's top-rated radio show, the Today program, on Radio 4. The program was at the centre of the furore over claims that the Iraqi government possessed weapons of mass destruction. He left the program amidst the events that led to the widely ridiculed Hutton Inquiry into the death of government scientist and Today program source, David Kelly.

Before working for the BBC's Business and Economics Units, he analysed geopolitical financial and environmental risk for Lloyd's of London after world markets crashed. Portfolio allocation was of the order of $2 bn.

He was one of the first English-language employees of Al Jazeera and worked at the Arab satellite station's flagship programme, 'Top Secret' which uncovered the Al Qaida plot to attack Washington and New York in 2001. He went on to become senior editor at Bloomberg Television.

Afshin Rattansi has written six novels that have been represented by  A. P. Watt and Curtis Brown Literary Agencies. His quartet, "The Dream of the Decade - The London Novels" is published by Booksurge in the United States of America.

He began his journalism career at The Guardian in London before working for a host of award-winning Channel 4 production companies. In 1999, he helped to launch the developing world's first global financial news and current affairs channel (see articles).

He is also a Fellow of the Asian Guild.

Coverage has included the major news stories of the past decade and a half including apartheid S. Africa under reporting restrictions, the fall of the Berlin Wall, BCCI, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the collapse of Barings, the UN Millennium Conference in New York, UK-supported Saddam, the Thatcher resignation, WTO-Seattle, Al-Aqsa Intifada, Monsanto, US-Mujahideen support in Afghanistan,  the Ethiopia-Eritrea war,  The Colombia drugs ‘war’, El Salvador, OPEC under Hugo Chavez, Rwandan genocide, Kashmir and the Line of Control,  the election of Vicente Fox in Mexico, the election of Sukarnoputri in Indonesia, the South-East Asian crash and the Bush campaign, the 2003 invasion of Iraq..