TEHRAN — Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh rejected on Saturday media reports claiming that Israeli agents shot al Qaeda’s second-highest leader on the streets of Tehran.

Khatibzadeh strongly denied any presence of the terrorist group’s members in Iran, advising the U.S. media not to be entrapped by the Hollywood-style scenarios invented by the U.S. and the Zionist regime’s officials, Tasnim reported.

The New York Times reported on Friday that Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, accused of being one of the masterminds of the deadly 1998 attacks on American embassies in Africa, was killed in Iran three months ago.

Quoting unnamed intelligence officials, the Times said Abdullah, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Masri, was gunned down on the streets of Tehran by two assassins on a motorcycle on Aug. 7, the anniversary of the embassy attacks. “He was killed along with his daughter, Miriam, the widow of Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza bin Laden.”

“That he had been living in Iran was surprising, given that Iran and Al Qaeda are bitter enemies,” the Times claimed, adding, “American intelligence officials say that Mr. al-Masri had been in Iran’s ‘custody’ since 2003, but that he had been living freely in the Pasdaran district of Tehran, an upscale suburb, since at least 2015.”

According to Khatibzadeh, Al-Qaeda is a result of the wrong policies adopted by the U.S. and its allies in the region.

“In order to shirk responsibility for the criminal activities of that group and other terrorist groups in the region, Washington and Tel Aviv try every now and then to draw a link between Iran and such groups through falsification and the leakage of fabricated information to the media,” the Foreign Ministry spokesman pointed out.

“Although the U.S. has not refrained from leveling any false accusation against the Islamic Republic of Iran in the past, such an approach has become a permanent modus operandi in the current U.S. administration, as the White House has attempted to make advances in implementing its Iranophobia plot by repeating such allegations,” he added.

The spokesman further said such accusations are undoubtedly part of the full-fledged economic, intelligence and psychological war against the Iranian people, and the media should not act as a tribune for spreading the White House’s purposeful lies about Iran.

MH/PA