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Iran on Saturday rejected a US newspaper article claiming al Qaeda’s second-in-command was killed in Tehran by Israeli agents as “fabricated information” and denied the presence of one of the group members Sunni jihadist in the Islamic Republic.
The New York Times reported that Abdullah Ahmad Abdullah, indicted in the United States for the 1998 bombings of his embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, was secretly shot dead in Tehran by Israeli members on motorcycles at the behest of Washington.
The top al-Qaeda leader, whose nom de guerre was Abu Muhammad al-Masri, was killed along with his daughter, Miriam, the widow of Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza, the Times reported on Friday, citing sources of intelligence.
The attack took place on August 7 on the anniversary of the bombings in Africa, according to the newspaper.
Iran’s enemies, the United States and Israel, “attempt to shift responsibility for the criminal acts committed by (Al-Qaeda) and other terrorist groups in the region and link Iran to these groups with lies and by disclosing fabricated information to the media, “Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said in a statement.
Khatibzadeh accused the United States itself and “their allies in the region” of having created al-Qaeda through their “bad policies” and advised the American media “not to fall into the trap of the Hollywood scripts of those responsible Americans and Zionists “.
U.S. intelligence officials told The Times that Abdullah had been detained by Iran since 2003, but had been living freely in the Pasdaran neighborhood of Tehran, a posh suburb, since at least 2015.
On August 7, he was driving a white Renault L90 sedan with his daughter near his home when two gunmen on a motorcycle shot them five times with a pistol fitted with a silencer, he said.
Iranian news agency IRNA and Mehr then reported a similar incident and identified the victims as Habib Dawoud, a 58-year-old Lebanese history teacher, and his daughter Maryam, 27, without giving further details.
They said that “the individual on a motorcycle pulled from the sidewalk and fled” from the scene and that police investigations were ongoing. There has been no update since.
– ‘Most experienced’ planner –
US federal authorities have offered a $ 10 million reward for the information leading to Abdullah’s capture.
He was “the most experienced and capable operational planner, neither in the United States nor in the custody of his allies,” according to a highly classified document provided by the US National Counterterrorism Center in 2008, according to the Times.
The bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 left 224 dead and more than 5,000 injured.
Abdullah was indicted by a US federal grand jury later this year for his role.
Washington accused Shiite Iran of harboring Al Qaeda operatives and allowing them to cross its territory in 2016, a charge denied by Tehran officials at the time.
Tehran, which has been the target of several attacks by Sunni extremists, considers Al-Qaeda a “terrorist group” and has participated in the fight against it, mainly in Syria and Iraq.
“Even though America has not shied away from making false accusations against Iran in the past, this approach has become routine in the current US administration,” Khatibzadeh said.
He accused President Donald Trump’s administration of pursuing an “Iranophobic” agenda as part of its “economic, intelligence and psychological” war against Tehran.
“The media should not be a loudspeaker for the publication of the White House’s deliberate lies against Iran,” he said.
Since the unilateral abandonment of a landmark nuclear deal between Iran and the great powers in 2018, the Trump administration has reimposed crippling economic sanctions against Iran as part of a policy of “maximum pressure” against its government. government.
dax / bfm / rma / amh / kam / hc
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