Reuters: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday
he suspected Britain played a role in twin bombings that killed five people in southwestern Iran on Saturday, the ISNA students news agency reported. Reuters
TEHRAN – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday he suspected Britain played a role in twin bombings that killed five people in southwestern Iran on Saturday, the ISNA students news agency reported.
“We are very suspicious about the role of British forces in perpetrating such terrorist acts,” ISNA quoted Ahmadinejad as saying during a cabinet meeting on Sunday.
His comments heightened a war of words between Tehran and London, which has repeatedly accused Iran of links to a spate of insurgent attacks against British troops in southern Iraq in recent days.
The British Embassy in Tehran earlier on Sunday denied any links to Saturday’s bombings outside a shopping mall in the oil town of Ahvaz, close to Iran’s border with Iraq, in which more than 80 people were wounded.
Iranian officials had previously accused British forces in southern Iraq of training and aiding Arab separatists blamed for a series of other bombings and unrest in the southwestern Khuzestan province earlier this year.
“Our people are used to these kind of incidents, and our intelligence agents found the footprints of Britain in the same incidents before,” Ahmadinejad said.
“We think the presence of British forces in southern Iraq and near the Iranian border is a factor behind insecurity for the Iraqi and Iranian people,” he added.
