TEHRAN, Iran – Iran said Sunday some al-Qaida operatives blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States may have illegally passed through Iran from Afghanistan months before the terror strike, but Tehran dismissed as “fabrications” U.S. reports that Iran may have helped in the assault.
“It’s normal that five or six people may have crossed the border within a couple of months without our knowledge. … Our borders are long, and it’s not possible to fully control them,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters.
Asefi was responding to a Sept. 11 commission report, expected out Thursday, that says Iran may have facilitated the 2001 attacks in the United States by providing eight to 10 al-Qaida hijackers with safe passage to and from terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
“Even more people may (illegally) cross the border between Mexico and the United States,” Asefi said.
Iran’s hard-line judiciary on Sunday abruptly ended the trial of a secret agent charged with murdering an Iranian-Canadian photojournalist in 2003, prompting Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi to lead her legal team out of the court and threaten to take the case to international organizations. Ebadi, who is representing the mother of slain journalist Zahra Kazemi in her first high-profile case since winning the Nobel last year, refused to sign documents charging the agent, Mohammad Reza Aghdam Ahmadi, saying they were flawed. No date was set for the verdict.
Afghanistan: Rocket kills one
A rocket fired into Kabul late Sunday killed a woman living close to the headquarters of international peacekeepers, residents and the international force said. The area is about 300 yards from the command compound of the 6,400-strong International Security Assistance Force and slightly farther from the U.S. Embassy and President Hamid Karzai’s palace.
U.S. forces have detained a former Taliban commander near Kabul, the Afghan capital, two months after praising him for backing the country’s new order, officials said Sunday. American troops seized Ghulam Mohammed Hotak on Saturday; U.S. military officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
Mexico and Cuba said Sunday they will reinstate ambassadors in each other’s countries at the end of the month, ending a diplomatic rift between Fidel Castro’s government and its former strongest ally. Both countries withdrew their ambassadors in May after Mexico accused Cuba of meddling in its internal affairs.
Tamara Khadzhiyeva, a local leader of Russia’s main pro-presidential party, was fatally shot early Sunday in Chechnya, and the region’s prosecutor said it was a contract killing linked to next month’s presidential election in Chechnya.
Germany: Hitler coup plot honored
Germany’s main Protestant bishop, Lutheran Bishop Wolfgang Huber, paid tribute at the Berlin Cathedral on Sunday to the dissident army officers who tried to blow up Adolf Hitler in a failed coup 60 years ago, calling them an example to the nation. The sermon was part of the buildup of anniversary events honoring Col. Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg and other high-ranking soldiers from the German aristocracy, executed in Berlin after the Nazi dictator survived the July 20, 1944, briefcase bomb placed by Stauffenberg.
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