Morocco cuts ties with Iran
Rabat to shut embassy in Tehran, expel envoy over support to Polisario
Morocco yesterday said it has cut ties with Iran over Tehran’s support for the Western Sahara independence Polisario front. Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita said Rabat will close its embassy in Tehran and will expel the Iranian ambassador.
Reacting to the news, Anwar Gargash, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, tweeted: “We stand with Morocco in its keenness to defend its national issues and against Iranian interference in its internal affairs.”
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest accusations about Iran’s past nuclear activities got a warm welcome in US.
US to discuss Iran archive
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the US would discuss Israel’s newest purported evidence with the other global powers that negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal. But Britain said the information reinforced the need to keep the deal in place, indicative of a far cooler reception in Europe yesterday, deepening divisions among Western allies ahead of President Donald Trump’s decision on whether to withdraw from the international nuclear deal later this month. Trump has signalled he will withdraw from the agreement by May 12 if it is not renegotiated and changed.
The UN nuclear agency said it considered the matter of whether Iran had previously pursued nuclear weapons to be “closed”. Responding to Netanyahu’s speech, the International Atomic Energy Agency issued a statement yesterday reaffirming that “the agency had no credible indications of activities in Iran relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device after 2009.”—Agencies
Trump gave no indication of whether he would scrap the deal or continue his effort to force the European partners who helped negotiate it to try to reopen it.
Revealing a huge archive of stolen Iranian nuclear plans, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel accused Iran on Monday of lying for years about its efforts to build a nuclear weapon.
Days before President Donald Trump was to decide whether to pull out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, Netanyahu presented records from a secret warehouse in Tehran, making the case that Iranian leaders had deceived the international nuclear agency when they insisted their nuclear programme was for peaceful purposes. Israeli regime spies seized the documents in an overnight raid in January, a senior Israeli official said.
But Netanyahu did not provide any evidence that Iran had violated the nuclear agreement since it took effect in early 2016. That suggests that the Israeli prime minister — who has opposed the deal since its inception, and even went to the US Congress to try to block it — was hoping that the disclosures would bolster Trump’s resolve to scuttle the agreement on May 12.
Doing so could be one of the most momentous foreign policy decisions of Trump’s time in office. In recent days, a succession of European leaders, including President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, have come to the White House to make the case that the US was more secure with the Iran deal than without it. Netanyahu’s presentation seemed intended to push the president in the other direction.
Trump was coy about his plans. Speaking at a Rose Garden news conference minutes after Netanyahu’s presentation, he gave no indication of whether he would scrap the deal or continue his effort to force the European partners who helped negotiate it — Britain, France and Germany — to try to reopen it.
Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, a top Iranian negotiator of the nuclear agreement, called Netanyahu’s remarks “a very childish and even a ridiculous play.”
In a telephone interview with state-run television, he said Netanyahu’s presentation was “a prearranged show with the aim of impacting Trump’s decision, or perhaps it is a coordinated plan by him and Trump in order to destroy the JCPOA,” the initials of the nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
“These files conclusively prove that Iran is brazenly lying when it said it never had a nuclear weapons programme,” Netanyahu said, pointing to copies of what he said were 55,000 printed pages and 183 compact discs.
Documents smuggled out
The senior Israeli official said the regime’s Mossad intelligence service discovered the location of the archive in February 2016, and had the building under surveillance since then. Mossad operatives broke into the building one night in January, removed the original documents and smuggled them back to Israel the same night, the official said.
Trump was informed of the operation by the Mossad chief, Yossi Cohen, on a visit to Washington in January, the official said. The official attributed the delay in making the material public to the time it took to sift through and analyse the documents, the vast majority of which were in Persian.
US intelligence agencies concluded in 2007 that Iran suspended the active portion of the bomb effort after the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, and Netanyahu confirmed that in his presentation. But he said other elements of what Iran had called “Project Amad” went ahead, directed by Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.