Spokesman Rejects NY Times’ Report on Killing of Al-Qaeda Element in Iran

Asked by reporters about the reports released by Israeli sources and a recent story by the New York Times which claims that an official of the al-Qaeda terrorist group has been assassinated in Iran, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson strongly denied any presence of the terrorist group’s members in Iran.

Khatibzadeh also advised the American media not to be entrapped by the Hollywood-style scenarios fabricated by the US and the Zionist regime’s officials.

The al-Qaeda terrorist group is a result of the wrong policies adopted by the US and its allies in the region, he noted, adding, “In order to shirk responsibility for the criminal activities of that group (al-Qaeda) and the other terrorist groups in the region, Washington and Tel Aviv try every now and then to draw a link between Iran and such groups through falsification and the leakage of fabricated information to the media.”

“Although the US has not refrained from levelling any false accusation against the Islamic Republic of Iran in the past, such approach has become a permanent modus operandi at the current US administration, as the White House has attempted to make advances in implementing its Iranophobia plot by repeating such allegations,” the spokesman added.

“Such accusations are undoubtedly part of the full-fledged economic, intelligence and psychological war against the Iranian people, and the media should not act as a tribune for spreading the White House’s purposeful lies about Iran,” the Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson concluded.

His comments came after the New York Times reported on Friday that al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, accused of helping to mastermind the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa, has been killed in Iran in August by Israeli operatives acting at the behest of the US.

The US newspaper claimed that Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Masri, was shot dead by two men on a motorcycle in Tehran more than three months ago.