DOHA (AFP) — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has questioned the accepted narrative of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, saying it was still not clear who was behind them.
”Something happened in New York and still nobody knows who the main perpetrators of that act were,” Ahmadinejad told diplomats and newspaper editors late on Sunday while on a brief visit to Qatar.
”No independent people were allowed to try and identify the perpetrators,” he charged.
”They say terrorists were hidden in Afganistan and NATO mobilised all its resources and attacked Afghanistan,” he said.
”They say that in the Twin Towers, 2,000 people were killed. In Afganistan, so far more 110,000 have been killed.”
Ahmadinejad has on several occasions questioned the accepted version of the 2001 attacks by Al-Qaeda militants, which killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States.
In March, he referred to the attacks as ”a big lie,” Iranian state media reported.
Iran is locked in a standoff with Western governments over its nuclear programme.
The UN Security Council imposed a fourth round of sanctions on June 9 over Iran’s failure to heed repeated ultimatums to suspend uranium enrichment, the sensitive process which can produce fuel for nuclear reactors or, in higly extended form, the fissile core of an atomic bomb.
The European Union, Japan and the United States have all imposed additional sanctions of their own, over and above the UN ones.
Western governments suspect Iran’s nuclear programme is cover for a weapons drive, something Tehran strongly denies.