Tehran: Iran denounced US President Donald Trump’s response to the twin attacks in Tehran as “repugnant,” and linked the violence claimed by Daesh to the US president’s visit to Saudi Arabia.
Trump capped his statement of condolence to the Iranian people on Wednesday with the warning that “states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote.” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif slammed the “repugnant” White House statement in a Twitter post on Thursday, adding, “Iranian people reject such US claims of friendship.”
Strains between Iran and the US have deepened since Trump took office in January, slapping new sanctions on the Islamic republic over its ballistic missile program and ratcheting up the rhetoric against it. In his first foreign trip as president to Saudi Arabia last month, he called for a united front against Iran and terrorist groups such as Daesh.
Daesh said it carried out the suicide-bomb and gun attacks that killed at least 12 people at Iran’s parliament and the shrine of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a site of political and religious importance for Iran’s Shiite Muslim population. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps promised retribution for the “innocent blood spilled” in the first such strike by the terrorists in Iran.
— Bloomberg
