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Iran has said that a New York Times report that Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command had been secretly assassinated in Tehran was based on “fabricated information” and denied the presence of any of the group’s members.
The NYT reported yesterday that Abdullah Ahmad Abdullah, charged in the United States for the 1998 bombings against his embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, was shot dead in Tehran by two Israeli agents on a motorcycle at the behest of Washington.
The senior al-Qaeda leader, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Masri, was killed along with his daughter, Miriam, the widow of Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza, the newspaper said, citing intelligence sources.
Washington accused Tehran of harboring members of Al-Qaeda and allowing them to pass through its territory in 2016, a charge denied by Tehran officials at the time.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said in a statement today that the United States and Israel “intend to shift responsibility for the criminal acts of (Al-Qaeda) and other terrorist groups in the region and link Iran with those groups with lies and leaking fabricated information to the media. “
Khatibzadeh accused the United States and “its allies in the region” of having created Al-Qaeda through their “wrong policies” and advised the US media not to “fall into the trap of US and Zionist officials on the Hollywood stage.” .
He added: “Although the United States has not shied away from making any false accusations against Iran in the past, this approach has become routine in the current US administration.”
Khatibzadeh accused President Donald Trump’s administration of pursuing an “Iranphobic” agenda as part of its “total economic, intelligence and psychological” war against Tehran.
“The media should not be a loudspeaker for the publication of the willful lies of the White House against Iran,” he said.
Since unilaterally abandoning a landmark nuclear deal between Iran and major powers in 2018, the Trump administration has re-imposed crippling economic sanctions against Iran as part of a “maximum pressure” policy against its government.
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