Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed on Saturday that Israeli agents have infiltrated his country's counterintelligence services, particularly the department tasked with foiling Israeli espionage. Ahmadinejad even alleged that officials within Iran's intelligence agencies sought to cover the tracks of the assassins of Iranian nuclear scientists, including the head of the Islamic republic's nuclear program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
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Speaking to a local media outlet, the former Iranian president, who was recently disqualified from running for re-election in Iran's upcoming presidential election on Friday, alleged that "a massive Israeli operation used a corrupt gang of security personnel in the upper echelons of the national intelligence apparatus."
The head of this "gang," Ahmadinejad said, was the head of the Israel department in the Iranian intelligence service, although he did not reveal the individual's name or the years in which he served in that capacity.
"This corrupt gang needs to reveal its crimes and answer for its part in the assassination of our nuclear scientists and the explosions at the Natanz nuclear facility," Ahmadinejad continued. "They stole important documents from the Turquzabad district near the capital Tehran, and from our intelligence [services]," he said, referring to what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a "secret atomic warehouse" showing traces of uranium.
The accusations were unprecedented in their severity from such a prominent Iranian figure.
"They [the alleged collaborators] perpetrated a very significant act in Turquzabad. They handed over several vehicles filled with documents to Israel. We're not talking about one piece of paper. There were several cars there full of documents. How did they manage to get through all the roadblocks in the country?" the former president asked.
"This corrupt gang in [our own] intelligence agencies concealed this information from the public. We discovered the operation only after our enemies chose to reveal its existence to the world," Ahmadinejad said, referring to Netanyahu's public address.
"The corrupt gang even hid the information from our intelligence minister and fed him lies and disinformation. They even told him that common thieves entered the building and has been arrested," Ahmadinejad added.
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