TEHRAN, 14 July 2004 — Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has said he suspects that US and Israeli “agents” are behind the wave of kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq, the state news agency IRNA reported yesterday.

Khamenei, in a meeting with visiting Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, lashed out at the West’s fight against terrorism and said that as a result, he preferred to see the Islamic republic do business with Asian countries.

“We seriously suspect the agents of the Americans and Israelis are conducting such horrendous terrorist moves,” Khamenei said, reasoning that he “cannot believe that the people who kidnap Filipino nationals, for instance, or behead US nationals are Muslims.”

The US-declared “war on terrorism”, he added, was merely a pattern of hypocrisy. “In the early 1980s, Iran suffered terrorist attacks in which 72 prominent personalities were martyred on one occasion and a president and a prime minister on another,” he said, referring to anti-government attacks by the People’s Mujahedeen armed opposition group.

Khamenei added that the group, which was granted a base of operations in Iraq by then-President Saddam Hussein, were “now living freely under the protective umbrella of those Western countries that claim to be the standard-bearers of the international campaign against terrorism.”

Khamenei also pointed to the 1998 killing by the Taleban of a group of Iranian diplomats in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

“Even then neither the Americans nor the Europeans ... showed any reaction at all,” he complained. Even though Iran is actively trading with the European Union, Khamenei asserted that the West’s record of terrorism would make his country look East for business.

“Iran prefers to do business with Asian partners, rather than countries in other parts of the world,” he told Goh, who is in Iran for five days and on the last leg of a tour that has already taken him to Pakistan, Bangladesh and India.

Also greeting the visiting premier was powerful former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani — now the head of Iran’s top political arbitration body — who accused the United States of a “two-faced” approach to terrorism.

“The double-faced and biased approach of the United States toward this ominous phenomenon is not only defeating efforts to fight it, but also escalating the problem,” Rafsanjani complained. And according to IRNA, Rafsanjani “pointed to the differences between terrorism and resistance” by raising the question of Palestinian armed resistance against Israeli occupation.

Meanwhile, Iran’s top national security body said yesterday that talks with Britain, France and Germany on the Islamic republic’s nuclear program would resume later this month, the state news agency IRNA reported.

The Supreme National Security Council, which is headed by nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani, made no reference to where the talks would be held or, more importantly, at what level.

European diplomats here would only say that officials from the two sides had been in “regular contact” on the nuclear issue anyway, and went on to rule out ministerial-level negotiations unless Iran was open to making more concessions to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Last October, the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany — the European Union’s so-called “big three” — converged on Tehran to secure Iran’s cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog.

Iran agreed to suspend sensitive uranium enrichment activities, allow tougher IAEA inspections and file a comprehensive declaration of its nuclear activities.

But since then the deal has been under pressure, with inspectors discovering omissions in Iran’s reporting, inspection visits delayed and the regime backing away from a pledge to suspend all enrichment-related activities.

Iran has also accused the Europeans of damaging the deal by sponsoring a critical resolution last month at the IAEA.