IRAN: Britain yesterday denied Iranian accusations that it was behind two bombings that killed five people in southwestern Iran.
Relations between Tehran and London have deteriorated sharply in recent weeks over British efforts to refer Iran's nuclear case to the UN Security Council. British officials have also accused Iran of aiding insurgents operating in Iraq.
Iran, in turn, has accused Britain of helping Arab separatists carry out attacks in its southwestern Khuzestan province, the heart of Iran's oil industry, where a number of small bombings and ethnic protests have taken place this year.
Two home-made bombs placed in garbage bins and detonated three minutes apart killed five people and injured more than 80 in Khuzestan's capital Ahvaz on Saturday.
"The explosions in Ahvaz had a British accent," the semi-official ILNA news agency quoted Brig Gen Mohammad Hejazi, head of Iran's Basij volunteer militia, as saying.
Iran's Interior Minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi also pointed to the involvement of British troops stationed in southern Iraq, close to the border with Khuzestan.
"Usually this kind of insecurity comes from the other side of the border and is guided from there," he told the ISNA students news agency.
The British embassy in Tehran issued a statement yesterday condemning the blasts.
"There has been speculation in the past about alleged British involvement in Khuzestan," the statement said.
"We reject these allegations. Any linkage between the British government and these terrorist outrages is certainly without foundation," it said.
Asked about British involvement in the bombings, Iran's Foreign Ministry said the matter was under investigation.
"Unlike the British we are not going to express our views without the necessary investigations," spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told a weekly news conference yesterday.
"We don't talk without proof and documentation," he said, in reference to Tehran's complaints that London had not provided evidence to support its accusations about Iran's alleged involvement in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the Iranian ambassador to Britain, Seyed Mohammed Hossein Adeli, speaking as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited London yesterday, said his country did not support the use of violence against British troops in Iraq and added that stability in Iraq was in Iran's best interest.
Adeli denied any suggestion Iran had supplied explosive devices to Iraqi insurgents attacking British forces. "We have already rejected categorically any link between Iran and the incidents that have taken place with British troops," he said.
He said it was not surprising some explosive devices found in Iraq were similar to Iranian devices because weapons from the two countries' eight-year war still litter the region.