Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Asafi rejected Wednesday Egyptian accusations an Iranian diplomat is involved in conspiracies against Egypt. "These claims and accusations are mere lies," Asafi said, the Iranian News Agency, IRNA, reported. Egyptian Public Prosecutor Maher Abdel Wahed announced Tuesday police arrested an Egyptian agent for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards recruited by an Iranian diplomat in Cairo to carry out terrorist attacks against Egypt and Saudi Arabia and to assassinate important Egyptian officials. | Must be a mistake, that sounds more like a al-Qaeda operation than a Iranian one. And everyone knows there's no connection between the two, right? Here's a update on the story we posted yesterday. |
Further stoking the allegations that Iran is behind much of the current unrest in the Middle East, Egypt's General Prosecutor Mahir Abdel Wahid revealed that Egyptian citizen Mohammed Eid Dabous was arrested and charged with spying for Iran's Revolutionary Guard, providing it with information to undertake terrorist attacks in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Wahid said Dabous gave the Iranians "the best locations to carry out assassinations and terrorist operations in Egypt." The information, he said, was given to Mahmoud Reda Hussain, a former official in Iran's diplomatic office in Cairo who is now a fugitive. Dabous was also charged with providing Iranians information on foreign residents in Saudi Arabia, who have been targets of terror attacks such as Monday's on the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah. Dabous, a former director of a religious school in Saudi Arabia, received more than $50,000 for his work and was promised more than $670,000 to supervise terrorist attacks in Egypt. | A former Saudi religious school teacher, huh? |
According to Wahid, in late 2001 Hussain invited Dabous to Iran and introduced him to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Relations between Iran and Egypt have warmed somewhat recently, but bilateral ties have been strained since 1979, when Egypt took in the deposed shah. The two broke off relations in 1980 over the Camp David accords. Two years later, Egypt accused Iran of supporting militants who killed President Anwar Sadat. Dabous was arrested in Egypt and will be tried by a security court. A trial date has not been set but he could get the death sentence if convicted. |