"Iran detains terrorists carrying Israeli arms
Sat, 22 Nov 2008 10:42:52 GMT
 The US State Department considers the PKK as a terrorist organization but has long been accused of supplying PJAK with arms to provoke ethnic unrest in Iran. |
Israeli-made weapons have been confiscated from terrorists arrested near the Iran-Iraq border, an Iranian intelligence official says.
“Four members of a terrorist organization equipped with Israeli weapons have been arrested near Iran’s border with Iraq’s Kurdistan region,” the counter-espionage director of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry said on Saturday.
The official told reporters that the group had entered Iran on an assassination mission, but were arrested by Iran’s intelligence forces before ‘doing anything.’
The intelligence director did not provide details regarding the exact location of the arrest or the nature or name of the terrorist group.
Iran has on several occasions reported clashes between government forces and members of the outlawed Party for Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK) along its western border with Iraq.
PJAK is considered to be an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which has been fighting Turkish troops for more than three decades.
Tehran has repeatedly accused Washington of aiding PJAK in a bid to stir up ethnic unrest in the country, an accusation the US denies.
In a 2006 article published in the New Yorker, investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, revealed that the US military and Israel are assisting PJAK by providing the group with equipment, training, and vital intelligence in a bid to destabilize the Islamic Republic.
