Defiant Putin Will Travel To Iran Despite Suicide Bomb Threat
President Putin said today that he would go ahead with an historic trip to Iran despite a warning from Russian security services that a gang of suicide bombers were plotting to assassinate him during the trip.
“Of course I am going to Iran,” Mr Putin said after meeting Chancellor Merkel in the German city of Wiesbaden, from where he was due to fly to Tehran later today.
“If I always listened to all the various threats and the recommendations of the special services I would never leave home.“
Mr Putin will be the first Kremlin leader to visit Iran since Joseph Stalin flew to a summit with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, his wartime allies, in 1943.
But the Kremlin confirmed last night that he had been told of a conspiracy to kill him during his visit for a summit of Caspian Sea nations tomorrow.
After insisting this morning that the trip would go ahead, officials had then suggested it might be cancelled because of the threat against the Russian leader. The Interfax news agency reported that Russian special services had learnt that several teams of suicide bombers and kidnappers had been training to kill or capture the Russian leader.
Kremlin officials had earlier suggested that the trip might be cancelled because of the threat against Mr Putin.
Any cancellation would certainly have angered Iran, which denied reports about an assassination plot and portrayed them as disinformation spread by adversaries hoping to spoil Russian-Iranian relations.
“Such kinds of false news won’t have any impact on the plans that we have for (Mr Putin’s) visit,” said Muhammad Ali Hosseini, a Foreign Ministry spokesman.
Mr Putin is due to meet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, his Iranian counterpart, and take part in the Caspian nations summit tomorrow with the leaders of Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, where they will discuss dividing up the energy-rich sea.
It is still unclear who the alleged plotters might be and why Iran would be chosen for any assassination attempt.
Russia is opposed to demands from the United States and other Western nations for tougher United Nations sanctions against Tehran over its nuclear ambitions. It is one of the few countries that has maintained good relations with Tehran and is continuing to build a nuclear power plant at Bushehr for Iran.
The US and European powers accuse Iran of secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons, although Mr Ahmadinejad insists that the programme is purely for civil energy purposes
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Oh dear lord… Somebody please tell me that’s a Photoshopped picture. That man may be the single most narcissistic human being on the planet, Paris Hilton included.
Of course he’s going to Iran. He said he was, and he’d damage his self-image if he didn’t go through with it. He’d go even if he had to do it while on fire.
Besides; there’s money to be made in facilitating Iran’s nuclear weapons program. What a jackass.
October 15th, 2007 at 11:17 amQ_Mech -
I was ready to sigh “Damn he’s so hot!” … Until I realized it was photo-shopped …
October 15th, 2007 at 11:46 amDamn, I though we were done with the cold war…yet another USSR whack-job with dellusions of czar-dom. Freaking Hooy morzhovy.
October 15th, 2007 at 12:04 pmQ-Mech and drillanwr, it’s probably not photoshopped. Remember seeing him riding horseback without a shirt, kind of like Sarkozy did when he was on that boat while here on vacation? It’s reported that he’s into karate or judo and being a former KGB he’s probably into working out. Russia is experiencing something similar to what we’re experiencing from south of the border. Who’d have ever thought that people would be swarming the border of Russia to get a job? But, they are. But, they’re mostly muslims from all those former -stans of the former Soviet Union. At least we get Catholic Mexicans,they get jihadist muslims. Chechians would love to kill him.
It was reported that at the time the Iranians took our embassy in ‘79 they were going to do the same to the Soviet Union’s embassy. Moscow told the Iranians that they’d vaporize their city if they did. The Iranians backed off. I don’t know if that story is true. What if Carter had said the same.
Neither of us will attack each other, we’re both into off-world things like the space station. There’s a part of me that would like to see things heat up on a friendly competition level for the sake of the aviation stuff. Some of the newest Russian fighter jets look pretty good. Keeps us on our toes.
October 15th, 2007 at 12:39 pmIt’s more scarecrow tactics from the Russian/Iranian intel people. Make a threat appear real enough, and if you’re caught standing up to it, you’re a hero. Puhleeze. Get a better scriptwriter Putin. Not a bad pic, just a bad, bad man.
October 15th, 2007 at 1:45 pmJohn,
It is photoshopped ; look at the face and the body, the carnation isn’t the same
well, I ask if the model is Marlon Brando ?
October 15th, 2007 at 11:00 pm