Israel's Netanyahu: Iran pursued 'secret nuclear programme'


READ MORE

Israel’s prime minister has accused Iran of having secretly pursued a nuclear programme amid rising tensions in the Middle East.


Unveiling a cache of files purporting to show that Iran “brazenly lied” when it said it did not have a nuclear programme, Benjamin Netanyahu gave a theatrical presentation on Monday claiming to have “conclusive” evidence of the “secret programme”.


His speech came against a backdrop of sustained efforts by the Trump administration and its allies at home and in the Middle East to cancel, or at least renegotiate, the 2015 nuclear pact signed between Iran and the US, France, Russia, Germany, China, the UK and the European Union.


“You may well know that Iran’s leaders repeatedly denied ever pursuing nuclear weapons … well tonight I’m here to tell you one thing – Iran lied, big time,” Netanyahu said.


He claimed that Iran, after signing the nuclear deal, intensified its efforts to hide files pertaining to its nuclear programme.


“A few weeks ago, in a great intelligence achievement, Israel obtained half a tonne of the material inside these vaults,” Netanyahu said before proceeding to show “55,000 pages” and another “55,000 files on 183 CDs”.


No big surprise


Much of what Netanyahu presented is unlikely to surprise world powers, which have long concluded that Iran was pursuing atomic weapons before the nuclear agreement was signed nearly three years ago.


Before Monday’s announcement, Netanyahu cancelled a speech in parliament and convened an emergency meeting of his security cabinet at Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv.



Netanyahu has been a leading critic of the nuclear agreement, saying it fails to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons capability.


He has also welcomed US President Donald Trump’s pledges to withdraw from the Iran deal if it is not changed.


Trump praised Netanyahu’s presentation as “good”, saying it and other recent events show he has been “100 percent right” about Iran.


Iran responds


Later on Monday Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, denounced Netanyahu’s address as a stunt.


“The boy who can’t stop crying wolf is at it again,” he said on Twitter, referring to Netanyahu’s 2012 UN General Assembly presentation that used props to allege Iran’s nuclear threat.


Iranian state TV said called Netanyahu’s accusations propaganda.


“His remarks was not new … full of baseless accusations … and propaganda against Iran’s nuclear work,” it said.


Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, said Netanyahu may have ulterior motives for making his address.


“Netanyahu has a very political incentive especially now with Trump trying to decide about the Iran nuclear deal,” he said.


“He has political incentive to manipulate the facts and exaggerate whatever information he has.”


Other analysts agreed.


“Netanyahu’s presentation was more of a political presentation and offered no new intelligence on Iran’s nuclear programme,” Fatemeh Aman, an Iran analyst based in Washington, DC, told Al Jazeera.



“Moreover, it is rather very strange that Netanyahu claims that Israel has real intelligence on Iran’s nuclear programme that somehow was missed by the extensive inspection regimes installed by the IAEA and the US and other Western intelligence organisations.”


Netanyahu’s accusations also appear to contradict a US state department report published earlier this month.


It said at the end of December 2017: “Iran continued to fulfill its nuclear-related commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)… Iran’s commitments to allow increased IAEA verification and monitoring … and to not engage in certain work that could contribute to the development of a nuclear weapon continue indefinitely.”


Earlier on Monday, an Iranian news agency said missile attacks overnight in northern Syria killed more than a dozen pro-government fighters, many of them Iranians.


There was no official confirmation of the death toll or what specific targets were, but the air strikes prompted speculation on who carried it out, with most reports suspecting Israel was behind it.


Syrian state TV called it a “new aggression on military positions” in Hama and Aleppo provinces, but was not specific.


Al Jazeera’s Ali Younes contributed to this report


Article source: https://www.thelocal.fr/20180409/french-police-launch-tense-operation-to-clear-airport-site-in-western-france


Best Wordpress Plugin development company in India     Best Web development company in India

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Canadian expected to be aboard Russia's 1st manned space mission since rocket failure

READ MORE The first manned mission to the International Space Station since a Russian rocket failed to launch successfully earlier this month may take off on Dec. 3, space agency Roscosmos said on Wednesday. And the crew is expected to include Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques, Agence France-Press reported. A Russian cosmonaut and U.S. astronaut were forced to abort their mission on Oct. 11 and perform an emergency landing after a launch accident that Roscomos said was caused by a faulty sensor. The accident was the first serious launch problem experienced by a manned Soyuz space mission since 1983, when a crew narrowly escaped before a launch pad explosion. Sergei Krikalyov, a senior Roscosmos official, was quoted by state news agency Tass as saying the next manned launch had been planned for mid-December, but that Russia was trying to bring the date forward so that the ISS is not briefly left without a crew. “The industry is making significant efforts to move the launch t...
Read more

Getting the dope on pot stocks is becoming easier as media groups invest in content: Don Pittis

Image
READ MORE “What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s happening,” goes the ’70s rock anthem. Part of the catchiness of the lyric — from the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar  — was that in that era the term “buzz” had developed a second spicy meaning. It described the high that people got from smoking cannabis. In the 1970s, the magazine High Times was a brand new title keeping an eye on the illegal but growing business of marijuana pricing and sales. It ran centrefolds of glistening pot plants and of an apartment filled to the windows with what the magazine insisted was an entire ton of cannabis. Now some of Canada’s most staid media voices are looking for ways to go toe to toe with High Times and its U.S. competitors, hoping to profit from Canada’s global head start in legal recreational cannabis. But when it comes to making a killing from spreading the buzz on the cannabis biz, to q...
Read more

Toronto man denies conspiring with Marvel CEO in alleged hate mail scheme

Image
READ MORE A Toronto man accused of conspiring with the head of Marvel Entertainment in a bizarre hate mail campaign against his wealthy former employer has denied any role in the alleged scheme. David Smith, along with Marvel CEO Isaac (Ike) Perlmutter, is the target of a slander lawsuit launched earlier this year by Canadian businessman Harold Peerenboom. Now Smith — a former employee of Peerenboom’s Toronto-based executive search firm, Mandrake Management — has filed a motion to dismiss the U.S. civil suit. It’s the latest development in the years-long legal battle between Peerenboom and Perlmutter, a notoriously reclusive American billionaire and personal friend of U.S. President Donald Trump. The hate mail campaign, which ran   between 2012 to 2015, saw anonymous letters falsely accusing Peerenboom of being a child molester, murderer and anti-Semite...
Read more