Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Wednesday rejected reports of mass casualties amid the ongoing wave of protests sweeping Iran, claiming that any killings that have occurred were the result of an “Israeli plot" aimed at inflating the death toll.
Araghchi made the remarks in an interview on Fox News’ Special Report with Brett Baier, where he was confronted with estimates suggesting the number of dead could range from 2,500 to more than 12,000 protesters. The senior Iranian official insisted the real figure is only in the hundreds. According to Araghchi, “terrorist elements led from outside" infiltrated the demonstrations and carried out brutal attacks.
“They came in, they used Daesh-style terrorist operations. They got police officers, burned them alive, they beheaded them, and they started shooting at police officers and also to the people," he said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist organization. “So as a result, for three days, we had, in fact, fighting against terrorists, and not with the protesters. It was completely a different story." He claimed these actors opened fire on civilians for “one reason": to provoke American intervention.
“They wanted to increase the number of deaths. Why? Because President Trump has said that if there are killings, he would intervene. And they wanted to drag him into this conflict," Araghchi said. “And that was exactly an Israeli plot. They started to increase the number of deaths by killing ordinary people, by killing police officers, by starting a kind of, you know, fighting inside the different cities." (Read More)
