TEHRAN, 24 July 2004 — One of Iran’s most powerful religious leaders made a stinging rebuttal yesterday of allegations from the United States that the Islamic republic may have been linked to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In his weekly Friday sermon, former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani also accused the United States of ignoring Iranian warnings of a growing Al-Qaeda and Taleban threat before the strikes on New York and Washington.
The comments from the charismatic leader, still one of Iran’s most influential figures, came after a national commission in Washington probing hijackings spotlighted alleged ties between Al-Qaeda and Iran. The panel said Tehran operatives maintained contacts with Al-Qaeda for years and may have provided transit for at least eight of the 19 hijackers.
Rafsanjani said the allegations had arisen from Washington’s “failure to provide security for its own people, as well as its failure to achieve its aims in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The administration of US President George W. Bush, he said, was made up of “egoists who need to blame other people”.
“We are not sure if they are telling the truth. But suppose these eight people did pass through Iran. How many other countries did they pass through on their way to America?” he told thousands of worshipers at Tehran University in a sermon carried live on state radio.
“The big question we have to ask America is, assuming they (the hijackers) passed through Iran, who put them in Afghanistan and who supported them in the first place,” he said. “This is no big secret. Al-Qaeda and the Taleban were created and nurtured by America in order to weaken the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s, Osama Bin Laden’s network of foreign fighters was one of the beneficiaries of CIA funds. Rafsanjani said that during Iranian contacts with US officials, “we said openly that what you created will turn on you and cause trouble for you.”
“But they did not pay attention to our advice,” he added. Iran and the US severed diplomatic ties after the 1979 revolution here, but maintain contacts via the Swiss Embassy here and have on occasions engaged in secret direct talks.
The US commission said Al-Qaeda and Iranian operatives struck an accord in late 1991 or 1992 to provide training for assaults on Israel and the United States, and terrorist leaders and trainers went to Iran for instruction in explosives.
It said “intelligence indicates the persistence of contacts between Iranian security officials and senior Al-Qaeda figures” after Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996. “They have a superficial attitude, and they take people for fools,” Rafsanjani said of the latest US allegations.
The Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement also angrily rejected the suggestion of links with Al-Qaeda contained in the US commission report.
“On several occasions in the past, Hezbollah has already assured that the American allegations on the existence of relations between the party and Al-Qaeda were nonexistent, very removed from the truth and lacking credibility,” the party said in a statement.
