TEHRAN: Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden was a prisoner in US custody for “sometime” before he was killed by the American military, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday.
“I have exact information that bin Laden was held by the American military for sometime... until the day they killed him he was a prisoner held by them,” the hardline president said in a live interview on Iranian state television.
“Please pay attention. This is important. He was held by them for sometime.
They made him sick and while he was sick they killed him,” Ahmadinejad added.
He accused US President Barack Obama for announcing the Al Qaeda leader's death for “political gain.” “What the US president has done is for domestic political gain. In other words, they killed him for Mr Obama's election and now they are seeking to replace him with someone else,” Ahmadinejad said without elaborating.
Bin Laden was shot dead on May 2 in a US commando raid on a heavily fortified compound near Islamabad, Pakistan.
On May 4, Iranian Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi too had cast doubt on bin Laden's death, saying there were “ambiguities” over the way he was killed.
The Americans said they threw his body in the sea. “Why did they not allowed an independent expert to examine the body to say if it was bin Laden or not?” Vahidi said.
Shia Iran has always considered Al Qaeda as a Sunni ultra-radical and anti-Shia threat to its security.
Ahmadinejad further said that Tehran is “ready for a dialogue” with the world powers on the nuclear issue and hopes that future meetings will yield results.
“The best solution is cooperation,” Ahmadinejad insisted in the interview on state television. “We hope that in future meetings (with world powers) if they occur, we get faster results.” He criticised the West's muted reaction to the letter sent by Iran in early May to European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton proposing resumption of talks over Tehran's nuclear issue.
A spokeswoman for Ashton earlier this week said that Iran's letter “does not contain anything new and does not seem to justify a further meeting”between the six world powers and Iran.
The five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany represented by Ashton are engaged in a dialogue with Iran over the latter's controversial nuclear programme which the world powers suspect is masking a weapons drive.
Iran denies the charge.
“I was surprised to hear that Ashton has taken such a position. We have stated our readiness for a dialogue in various fields based on mutual respect, within the framework of international laws and in a spirit of cooperation,”Ahmadinejad said Sunday.
“Maybe Ashton expects that we have to accept her position when we have a dialogue. But then this is not a dialogue, this is a diktat.”An attempt to resume nuclear talks between the two groups in December and in January ended in a failure, with both sides sticking to their positions.
While the world powers want to focus on the Iranian nuclear programme, Tehran wants to expand the discussions to issues such as global security, global nuclear disarmament, the possession of nuclear weapons by Israel and the right of all countries to civilian nuclear cooperation. – AFP
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