Ahmadinejad: Bin Laden Was in America's Possession for Some Time

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stated that he has reliable information that indicates that Americans didn’t kill the deceased leader of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, for the sake of the war on terrorism, but rather killing him was a propaganda tool inside the U.S. in order to attract more votes in the upcoming elections.

Yesterday, Fars, the Iranian news agency, reported remarks made by Ahmadinejad during his meeting with participants at the International Conference on Global Alliance against Terrorism in Tehran. He said that he has reliable information that suggests that “the person who was killed recently was in the American military’s hands for some time and that the U.S. took on the operation as a pretext to invade the region,” adding that “we have witnessed the death of 150 Pakistanis every day.”

And Ahmadinejad added that former American President George W. Bush “sought to save the American economy as well as to attract more votes at a time in which he used the pretense of the war on terror to kill a million people.” He pointed out that the current American president, Barack Obama, “follows the same policy,” according to the agency.

And the Iranian president explained that America and its allies “strive to save ‘the Zionist entity’* from certain death, so that the region has been threatened for dozens of years with a lack of security, assassinations and pressures.”

And he said, “We are witnessing today an increase of terrorism and the use of force, and we clearly see ‘economic assassination,’ which is defined as attacking national interests. Despite the great wealth of African and South American countries, they live like poor people in light of the spread of illiteracy, while Western countries seize their wealth. This is what is called ‘economic assassination,’” according to the agency.

*Translator’s Note: “The Zionist entity” is a pejorative term commonly used in the Arab world to refer to Israel.