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A US media report, citing unidentified officials, said that an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the US ambassador to South Africa, Lana Marks, was planned ahead of the US presidential elections in November.
FILE: United States President Donald Trump, accompanied by members of the coronavirus task force, speaks during a briefing on the coronavirus pandemic in the White House press conference room on March 25, 2020 in Washington, DC. Image: AFP
TEHRAN – Iran on Tuesday warned the United States not to make a “strategic mistake” after President Donald Trump threatened Tehran over reports that it planned to avenge the assassination of Senior General Qasem Soleimani.
“We hope that they will not make a new strategic mistake and certainly in the case of any strategic mistake they will witness the decisive response from Iran,” government spokesman Ali Rabiei told a televised press conference.
• SSA: Ramaphosa will be updated on the investigation of the plot to assassinate US Ambassador Lana Marks
A US media report, citing unidentified officials, said that an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the US ambassador to South Africa, Lana Marks, was planned ahead of the US presidential elections in November.
“Any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude.” Trump wrote on Twitter on Monday.
Rabiei lamented that “the president of a country that has claims to global management and order makes hasty, agenda-driven and dubious comments on such a weak basis.”
He warned that reacting to such reports “would accomplish nothing more than disturbing the region and the global calm” and advised Trump “to refrain from a new adventurism … for the sake of winning a new term as president.”
On Monday, the Foreign Ministry denied the report of an assassination plot as “unfounded” and part of “rotten and repetitive methods to create an anti-Iranian atmosphere.”
Relations between Washington and Tehran have been strained since the 1979 Islamic revolution. They have deteriorated dramatically since Trump unilaterally withdrew from a landmark international nuclear deal with Iran in May 2018 and reimposed crippling sanctions.
The Iranian navy said last week that it chased away US planes flying near an area where naval exercises were taking place near the sensitive Strait of Hormuz.
The military said air defenses detected three US aircraft.
One of them was an American RQ-4 drone, the same model as the one shot down by Iran in June last year after allegedly violating Iranian airspace, a claim the United States has denied.
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