Khamenei's comments came as France and Germany threatened fresh sanctions against Tehran and Germany’s leading insurance companies announced they would stop doing business in the country.
The Iranian leader was given a tour of the destroyer Jamaran, which was launched at a Gulf port on Friday. State television, which broadcast the event, said the warship was the country’s first domestically built destroyer and a major technological leap for Iran’s naval industries. The warship is equipped with anti-ship and surface-to-air missiles as well as torpedoes and naval cannons, state television said.
Khamenei declared that America and Israel were trying to sow divisions between Iran and Arab nations.
“The US and the Zionist regime are trying to spread divisions to distract the attention of Islamic nations from the main enemies of the Islamic world, which are the US and Israel,” Khamenei said in remarks broadcast on state TV.
Khamenei said the presence of foreign forces in the Gulf “disturbs security” in the region but that Washington will fail to achieve its goals. He said Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons and that, in any case, Islam forbids weapons of mass destruction. He said accusations by President Barack Obama and other American officials to the contrary were made out of anger.
“Repeating absurd words about the building of nuclear weapon in Iran shows that the enemies are resorting to repeating the propaganda out of ultimate failure,” Khamenei said.
In another development, France and Germany said they were considering expanding sanctions against Iran through the United Nations Security Council if the country continues to ignore UN resolutions while Russia said it was “very alarmed” by Iran’s failure to cooperate with the IAEA.
“Of course Iran has the right to use nuclear energy for civil purposes, but it has no right to create nuclear weapons,” German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle told reporters in Berlin.
The comments came in response to report by the IAEA on Thursday that suggested Tehran had either resumed working on a nuclear weapon or had never stopped in 2007, as was concluded by a US intelligence assessment.
“This report confirms with precision the international community’s very serious concerns,” French Foreign Ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said. “It shows how urgent it is to act with determination to respond to the absence of cooperation by Iran.” German reinsurer Munich Re AG said Friday it will not renew existing business contracts or draw up any new ones with insurance companies in Iran, while Allianz SE said it wouldn’t renew its reinsurance business there.
“We’ve been looking at the situation for a long time; the political situation is worse now and we decided to stop business,” Munich Re spokesman Klaus Schmidtke told the AP. He said most of the company’s business there is property reinsurance.
Allianz, also based in Munich, said it “has decided not to renew its reinsurance treaty business in Iran because of the political developments in the region.
In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov indicated that Moscow’s patience was wearing very thin.
“We are very alarmed and we cannot accept this, that Iran is refusing to cooperate with the IAEA,” Lavrov told the Ekho Moskvy radio station in an interview.
“For about 20 years, the Iranian leadership carried out its clandestine nuclear program without reporting it to the IAEA,” he said. “I do not understand why there was such secrecy.”
