A newspaper affiliated with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei condemned Iran’s foreign minister for denying threats to assassinate US President Donald Trump, calling it state policy and a matter of justice.
“The issue with Trump and Netanyahu is not assassination, but the implementation of justice,” Kayhan wrote Wednesday, also referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday that the Islamic Republic does not seek to kill anybody abroad.
"This is not our policy to kill anybody outside Iran, let alone the president of another country," he said, though clerics have issued fatwas calling for his death.
A hardline Iranian cleric close to Iran’s Supreme Leader called on Muslims to kill US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in June in response to their threats against Khamenei.
The call came days after Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi and Ayatollah Hossein Nouri Hamedani issued separate fatwas against Trump and Netanyahu.
Shirazi said in his statement: “Any regime or individual threatening the leaders of the Islamic Ummah (nation) and acting on those threats qualifies as a mohareb.”
Kayhan described both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as corruptors on earth and mohareb (enemy of God), terms which if invoked in fatwas or decrees under Shi'ite jurisprudence make it religiously obligatory for devout Shi'ite Muslims to act.
The penalty for the crimes in the Islamic Republic's theocratic system is death.
Kayhan also denounced Araghchi’s comment that “this has never been Iran’s policy to wipe out Israel from the map,” calling the comment “against the country’s official and strategic positions.”
The paper cited statements by the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ruhollah Khomeini, who said Israel “must vanish from the page of time,” as well as Khamenei’s 2015 vow that “Israel will not see the next 25 years.”
The backlash follows criticism from the Revolutionary Guards-affiliated Fars News Agency, which said Araghchi’s recent remarks admitting damage to the country's nuclear facilities and enrichment risked projecting weakness in the wake of the war with Israel.
“Our facilities have been damaged – seriously damaged,” Araghchi said in his interview after US strikes on the country's three main facilities were said to have "obliterated" Iran's nuclear program, according to Trump. “The extent of which is now under evaluation … enrichment has currently ceased."
Fars also faulted him for dismissing clerical fatwas targeting Trump, saying that to deny it undermines national resolve.
In January, Iran's President, Masoud Pezeshkian, said that Iran “never attempted” to kill Trump, “and we never will.”
