(Adnkronos) – Iran has “never” tried to hatch plans to kill Donald Trump. This is according to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. “It’s another one of those plans that Israel and other countries come up with to promote Iranophobia,” he said in an interview with NBC News. “Iran has never attempted nor plans to kill anyone. At least as far as I know.” Pressed by Lester Holt, when asked “are you saying there was never an Iranian plot to kill Donald Trump?” just days before the tycoon’s return to the White House, the Iranian president replied: “Absolutely not.”
In November, the United States Department of Justice indicted an Iranian man in connection with an alleged plot to assassinate Trump while he was still a presidential candidate. According to US authorities, it would have been a plot to avenge the death of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force killed in a US raid in Baghdad in January 2020 during the first Trump administration.
In 2018, during his first term, Trump decided to withdraw the United States from the international agreement on the Iranian nuclear program and to restore US sanctions against Tehran, which in turn began to backtrack on its commitments. In recent days, Iran and the ‘E3’ countries – the United Kingdom, France and Germany – met in Geneva to discuss Tehran’s nuclear program, the second round of talks in less than two months.
And a few days after Trump’s return to the White House, in the interview Pezeshkian reiterated that in principle Iran is open to dialogue, “but the problem is not the dialogue”, but “the commitments that emerge from the talks and from the dialogue”. “We have kept all our commitments – he claimed – But unfortunately it was the counterpart that did not keep the promises, did not respect the commitments”. “We have the doubt that, however much we may engage in talks and dialogue, they are trying to overthrow the government, not to solve the problems,” he added.
