US vows to hold Iran accountable over ‘death plot’

THE United States warned yesterday it would hold Tehran accountable after foiling an alleged high-level Iranian plot to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington.

“It is an outrageous act, where the Iranians will have to be held accountable,” US Vice President Joe Biden told ABC television’s Good Morning America programme.

“The first thing we do is make sure the entire world and all of the capitals in the world understand what the Iranians had in mind,” Biden said.

In an explosive twist to a bitter face-off with the Islamic republic, the US Justice Department charged two men with conspiring with Iranian officials to assassinate Saudi ambassador to the United States Adel al-Jubeir.

The alleged Iranian scheme — which also sought to have enlisted Mexican drug cartels for help in obtaining explosives — involved detonating a bomb at a restaurant the envoy frequented, an act which could have claimed the lives of countless innocent patrons.

Biden told ABC television that the heinous alleged murder plot would “unite the whole world in the moral disapprobation of the Iranians,”

He said the global community would respond accordingly — possibly with a new round of sanctions.

A criminal complaint in Washington on Tuesday named Manssor Arbabsiar, 56, a naturalised US citizen holding Iranian and US passports, and Gholam Shakuri, an Iran-based member of the Quds Force, a unit of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Shakuri remains at large while Arbabsiar was arrested on September 29 at New York’s John F Kennedy International Airport and appeared in court Tuesday in Manhattan. His lawyer said he would plead not guilty, if charged.

Iran swiftly denied the plot charges, with officials accusing the United States of trying to divert attention from its domestic problems or sow discord in the Middle East between Iran and its Arab neighbours.