Riyadh angered by Zarif’s comments about assassination of prominent Iranian scientist

The Saudi minister of state for foreign affairs has hit out at the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif after the he implicated Riyadh — along with Israel and the US — in an anti-Iran psychological operation that led to the recent assassination of prominent nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

Adel al-Jubeir said, in a Twitter post on Tuesday, the chief diplomat was “desperate” to put the blame on the Riyadh regime in anything negative that happened in Iran.

“Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif is desperate to blame the Kingdom for anything negative that happens in Iran. Will he blame us for the next earthquake or flood?,” Jubeir twitted.

The Saudi minister’s tweet came after Zarif announced in an Instagram post on Monday night that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent tour of the region, his tripartite meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as well as Netanyahu’s recent comments were signs of another conspiracy against Iran, which unfortunately came to light with Fakhrizadeh’s murder.

“A counter-intelligence campaign and purposeful psychological warfare were launched in tandem with this terrorist act, in the delusive hope that the evil plans of Pompeo, Netanyahu and bin Salman to create tensions would materialize,” Zarif’s had said.

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who headed the Iranian Defense Ministry’s Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research (which is known by its acronym SPND), was targeted on November 27 in a multi-pronged assasination by suspected Israeli-tied terrorists.

Unlike other countries in the region, including its allies at the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Saudi Arabia has refused to decry the assassination of the top Iranian physicist.

Abdallah al-Mouallimi, permanent representative of the kingdom to the United Nations, nevertheless, claimed during a recent interview that his country “did not support the policy of assassinations at all.”

It is really not the first time that Iran finds Saudi Arabia’s footprints in deadly terrorist operations on Iranian soil.

Back on June 10, similarly, Denmark called in the Saudi ambassador to Copenhagen to protest the kingdom’s backing of a terrorist group behind a 2018 bloody attack in Iran’s southwestern city of Ahvaz, among its many other terrorist crimes against Iranians.

The regime in Saudi Arabia has also been a key supporter of the so-called Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO), a notorious terrorist group that has the blood of thousands of Iranians on its hands.

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