The explosion at Rajaei port stemmed from internal safety failures and mismanagement, said an Iranian lawmaker, rejecting foreign involvement.
"No evidence has been presented so far to suggest foreign actors were involved," said Ali Khezrian, a member of parliament’s National Security Committee said on Monday.
"Deflecting blame under current circumstances will only distract public attention from those truly responsible for this disaster," he added, according to Iranian media.
"We believe that the rights of the people of Azerbaijan must be respected, and Karabakh must belong to the country of Azerbaijan. Karabakh is an inseparable part of the soil of Azerbaijan, and we respect that," Masoud Pezeshkian said during a meeting with Azerbaijani officials in Baku on Monday.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev officially welcomed Pezeshkian at the Zagulba Presidential Palace on Monday afternoon, followed by a private meeting between the two leaders and a joint session of their high-ranking delegations.
Tensions between Tehran and Baku have run high for years, largely due to Baku's close ties with Iran's nemesis Israel and a January 2023 attack on Azerbaijan's embassy in Tehran.
Last week, Pezeshkian expressed hopes for a rapid improvement in relations and cooperation between the two countries as part of a broader effort to mend ties.
Iran and Azerbaijan held two-day joint naval exercises in the Caspian Sea in November, in moves towards rapprochement.
Pezeshkian’s remarks come a month after Iran welcomed a peace agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, a decades-long dispute rooted in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's dissolution, saw a significant development in March when both Azerbaijan and Armenia announced an agreement on the text of a peace treaty.
Nagorno-Karabakh, internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but historically with a majority ethnic Armenian population, had long been a flashpoint between the two South Caucasus nations.
Iran, sharing a northern border with both countries, has consistently underscored its interest in regional stability, particularly along its 44-kilometer frontier with Azerbaijan.
An Iranian newspaper close to parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibafsaid that the recent explosion at the Rajaei port in southern Iran might be a deliberate act to undermine ongoing negotiations with the United States.
In an editorial, Sobh-e No daily said that while the cause of the large blast remains officially undetermined, the timing of the incident alongside nuclear talks and threatening rhetoric from Israel warranted consideration of potential sabotage aimed at derailing diplomatic progress.
"The swift news reporting by foreign media and the creation of rumors regarding the containers that caught fire is the same scenario of disrupting the negotiation atmosphere by the Zionist regime,” read the article.
The newspaper highlighted a prior warning from Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who tweeted two days before the explosion about potential disruptive actions by Israel against the Iran-US nuclear diplomacy. Araghchi had said that Iranian security forces were on high alert for potential sabotage and assassination attempts.
“Considering the political aspects of this incident, the economic sensitivity of this port, and the history of attacks on nuclear facilities, the possibility of sabotage cannot be ignored; just as the possibility of negligence and a natural accident also exists."
