THE IRANIAN government must be held accountable for a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US, regardless of whether top-ranking authorities in Tehran were aware of the plan, US president Barack Obama said yesterday.
Mr Obama was responding for the first time to accusations made public by US attorney general Eric Holder on Tuesday.
Mansour Arbabsiar, the Iranian-born naturalised American who is accused of initiating the plot, is to appear in a district court in New York for a preliminary hearing on October 25th.
“There are officials in the Iranian government who are aware of this plot,” Mr Obama said, adding that “even if at the highest levels there was no detailed operational knowledge, there has to be accountability with respect to anybody in the Iranian government engaging in this kind of activity”.
Commentators have this week recalled the Bush administration’s use of false evidence to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Numerous experts have cast doubt on allegations that Iran employed an Iranian emigrant used-car salesman in southern Texas to ask a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate Adel al-Jubeir for $1.5 million (€1.09 million).
“This plot, if true, departs from all known Iranian policies and procedures,” Gary Sick, who was the White House Iran expert during the Iranian revolution and is now an academic at Columbia University, wrote in his personal blog.
“Iran has never conducted – or apparently even attempted – an assassination or a bombing inside the US. And it is difficult to believe that they would rely on a non-Islamic criminal gang to carry out this most sensitive of all possible missions.”
Mr Obama said: “We’re going to continue . . . to mobilise the international community to make sure that Iran is further and further isolated and pays a price for this kind of behaviour.”
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton yesterday accused Iran of violating the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Internationally Protected Persons, which Iran signed in 1978.
Legal experts say the US could take the violation to the UN Security Council or seek a ruling from the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Mrs Clinton said the US treasury department was about to announce sanctions against more named individuals.
Hawks in Congress have called for more forceful steps against Iran, and Mr Obama would like to avoid being labelled “soft on Iran” in the midst of a presidential election campaign.
It is increasingly difficult to find non-military methods of punishing the Islamic republic. “I mean, they’re pretty well sanctioned,” Mrs Clinton told Reuters. “Now we’re going after individuals, we’re going after entities.”
The character of Mr Arbabsiar is one of the more puzzling aspects of the plot. The Houston Chronicledescribed the 56-year-old as a permanently dishevelled, disorganised loser whose nickname "Jack" came from the large amounts of Jack Daniel's whiskey he consumed.
It would be unprecedented for Iranian hardliners to use such an un-Islamic agent. "He couldn't even pray, doesn't know how to fast," Tom Hosseini, an Iranian who was Mr Arbabsiar's college roommate and who has known him for 30 years, told the Chronicle.
“He used to drink, smoke pot, go with the prostitutes. His first wife left him because he would lose his keys every other day . . . This guy is not a mastermind.”
Mr Hosseini said money was the only thing that might have motivated Mr Arbabsiar.