Iran has rejected a suggestion by a man claiming to be a former member of its intelligence services that Tehran was involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
| "Nope. Nope. Never happened." |
The Iranian embassy in Berlin said in a statement that claims of a link between Iran and Al Qaeda were groundless and that the statements were the "contradictory and false declarations of an unknown person". In the statement the Iranian embassy "robustly denied this rumour, which is without foundation," and said Tehran was fully committed to the fight against global terror. The man has been called as a witness in a trial being held in Germany of Moroccan student Abdelghani Mzoudi over the suicide hijackings that killed more than 3,000 people. Identified by the codename Hamid Remz Zakeri, the man was called on by federal prosecutors to appear at the trial only hours before a verdict was due because they were convinced he could incriminate Moroccan student Abdelghani Mzoudi in the attacks. On Wednesday, the court made a shock announcement that it had agreed to wait to deliver its verdict in the case in order to assess the credibility of the new witness. German media report the witness told German police that Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ex-president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and three other clerics met with Osama bin Laden's eldest son at an airbase near Tehran on May 4, 2001 to finalise the plans for the attacks. The officers testified that the witness told them Mzoudi had been in Iran and was "active in the logistics of the September 11, 2001 operation," including the "composition and transmission of [encrypted] information to intermediaries". The mysterious witness is due to testify in person at the trial in Hamburg, north Germany, German radio and television broadcaster NDR reported on its website on Saturday, claiming to have spoken with Zakeri by telephone. |