Iran Claims Terror Plot Accusation Is Diversion by U.S.
Nicholas Kamm/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador, was said to be the target of an assassination plot involving a Mexican drug cartel.
By J. DAVID GOODMAN and RICK GLADSTONE
Published: October 12, 2011
Iran’s leaders marshaled a furious formal rejection on Wednesday of the United States accusations that the Islamic republic had schemed to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, calling the case a cynical fabrication meant to vilify Iran and distract Americans from their own severe economic problems, highlighted by the Occupy Wall Street movement.
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Nueces County Sheriff's Office , via Reuters
Mansour J. Arbabsiar
The Foreign Ministry of Iran issued an angry complaint to the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, which is responsible for monitoring United States interests in Iran since the two broke diplomatic relations 32 years ago after the Islamic Revolution. The ministry said it had summoned the Swiss ambassador to personally convey its outrage over the American charges and warn “against the repetition of such politically motivated allegations.”
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, went a step further. In a speech broadcast on Iran state television, he predicted what he called the demise of American capitalism and corporate favoritism. Press TV, an Iran government Web site that translated portions of the ayatollah’s speech, said he emphasized that “the corrupted capitalist system shows no mercy to any nation, including the American people.”
The ayatollah commended the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, Washington and other American cities, calling them a consequence of “the prevalence of top-level corruption, poverty and social inequality in America.” He denounced what he called “the heavy-handed treatment of the demonstrators by U.S. officials” and said that such treatment “is not seen even in underdeveloped countries with dictatorial regimes.”
“They may crack down on this movement but cannot uproot it,” Ayatollah Khamenei said. “Ultimately, it will grow so that it will bring down the capitalist system and the West.”
The semi-official Fars news agency drew the connection more explicitly in an article with the headline: “U.S. Accusations Against Iran Aim to Divert World Attention from Wall Street Uprising.” The article quoted a senior member of Iran’s Parliament, Alaoddin Boroujerdi, as saying he had “no doubt this is a new American-Zionist plot to divert the public opinion from the crisis Obama is grappling with.”
The Iranian government had previously referred to the Occupy Wall Street protests as a nascent American version of the revolutionary wave that has swept through the Middle East this year, dubbing the protests an “American spring.”
In the Iranian plot outlined on Tuesday by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in Washington, officials in the elite Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps are accused of scheming to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States by hiring assassins from a Mexican drug cartel for $1.5 million. The main suspects were identified as Mansour J. Arbabsiar, a naturalized American citizen of Iranian descent from Corpus Christi, Tex., who has been taken into custody, and Gholam Shakuri, described by the Justice Department as a member of the Quds Force, who is at large and believed to be in Iran.
Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, declined to elaborate on who among Iran’s hierarchy are suspected of complicity. “We know from the facts that it clearly involved senior levels of the Quds force,” he told reporters at the daily White House briefing in Washington on Wednesday. “But that is as specific as I am going to be."
The accusations, which even many Iran experts in the United States greeted with some measure of disbelief, appear to have not only significantly elevated the antagonism between Iran and the United States but also deepened the mistrust between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia made its first public comments on the case, condemning the plot outlined by the Americans but stopping short of taking any action to sever or downgrade relations with Iran. The Saudis are renowned for their conservatism in taking action, and pointedly, the country’s statement followed a similar response by the secretary general of the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council.
The statement, carried by the Saudi Press Agency, called the plot described by the American attorney general “outrageous and heinous.” It urged other Arab and Muslim countries and “the international community” to “assume their responsibilities relating to these terrorist acts and the attempts to threaten the stability of countries as well as international peace and security.”
In London, Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi ambassador to the United States, said that Iran should take the accusations seriously and prosecute the Iranians who concocted the plot.
“Whoever is responsible for this in the Iranian government will hopefully be brought to justice by Iranian authorities, no matter how high the level of that person is,” said the prince, now the chairman of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, in remarks at an energy industry conference.
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