President: US using assassination claim as excuse

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said US claims of Iranian involvement in an alleged plot to kill Saudi ambassador will prove false and are meant to create a rift between Tehran and the Saudis. Ahmadinejad said the US allegations resemble its claims about weapons of mass destruction that formed the basis for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and would prove to be equally untrue. The Iranian president suggested that the US aimed to cause a rift between Tehran and Saudi Arabia that would help Washington dominate the oil-rich Persian Gulf and had fabricated the plot of an Iranian seeking to kill the Saudi ambassador to America. "In the past the US administration claimed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They said it so strongly, they offered and presented documentations and everyone said: 'Yes, we believe in you. We buy it,'" Ahmadinejad said in a live interview on al-Jazeera television on Monday evening. "Now is everyone asking them, were those claims true? Did they find any weapon of mass destruction in Iraq? They fabricated a bunch of papers. Is that a difficult thing to do? "The truth will be revealed ultimately and there will be no problem for us at that time," he added. When asked whether he thought Iran and the US were on an inevitable "collision course" towards military conflict, Ahmadinejad replied, "I don't think so. I think that there are some people in the US administration who want this to happen but I think there are wise people in the US administration who know they shouldn't do such a thing." Nevertheless, Ahmad Reza Pourdastan, commander of Iranian ground forces, said his troops were "fully prepared and ready to give a quick response to any aggression on Iran's soil". "Today America is too unsteady to even think about launching an attack on Iran," he told FNA. Ahmadinejad called on Saudis not to fall for a US strategy which he said aimed to divide and conquer the Persian Gulf. "If the US administration is under the impression that by doing this it can create conflict between us and Saudi Arabia then I have to say the US administration is sorely mistaken. "The US administration is not interested in Iran or in Saudi Arabia. They see their interests in having a dispute between Iran and Saudi Arabia - they want to dominate our region," he said. On October 11, the US alleged that Iran had attempted to hire a Mexican drug gang to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel Al-Jubeir. The New York federal court has pressed charges against two men in the alleged plot. Manssor Arbabsiar is a 56-year-old naturalized US citizen. In May 2011, the US criminal complaint says, he approached someone he believed to be a member of the vicious Mexican drug cartel, Los Zetas, for help with an attack on the Saudi Ambassador to Washington Adel al-Jubeir. The man he approached turned out to be an informant for US drug agents, it says. The US administration charges that Arbabsiar had been told by his cousin Abdul Reza Shahlai to recruit a drug trafficker for a hitman job. Tehran has repeatedly rejected the accusation as "baseless" and "a fabricated scenario". Yet, Iran's Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi has voiced Tehran's preparedness to examine the allegations. "We are prepared to examine any issue, even if fabricated, seriously and patiently, and we have called on America to submit to us any information in regard to this scenario," he said.