Ahmadinejad Calls 9/11 ‘A Big Fabrication’

By ROBERT MACKEY /
The New York Times News Blog /

Perhaps concerned that his repeated suggestions that the Holocaust might not have happened have become less shocking over time, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad upped the ante on Saturday, telling intelligence officials in Tehran that the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 was staged. In remarks reported by IRNA, an official Iranian news agency, and translated by Reuters, Mr. Ahmadinejad said, “The September 11 incident was a big fabrication as a pretext for the campaign against terrorism and a prelude for staging an invasion against Afghanistan.” Mr. Ahmadinejad also reportedly described the attacks in New York as a “complicated intelligence scenario and act.” Conspiracy theorists in the Middle East have suggested that the attacks were not the work of Al Qaeda, but carried out by Israeli or American intelligence operatives.

In a speech during Iran’s annual anti-Israel day in September, Mr. Ahmadinejad said of the Holocaust, “The pretext for the creation of the Zionist regime is false.” He added: “It is a lie based on an unprovable and mythical claim.” Mr. Ahamdinejad’s claims come at the end of a week in which Radovan Karadzic, the former leader of Bosnia’s Serbs, told a war crimes tribunal in the Hague that both the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre at Srebrenica were “myths,” and a mentally ill gunman from California, who had written that he was interested in “establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions,” opened fire at the Pentagon.