Iran on Friday responded for the first time to Turkey's thwarting of planned terrorist attacks against Israelis on Turkish soil.
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Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh called Foreign Minister Yair Lapid's accusation of an Iranian plot to harm Israelis in Istanbul "ridiculous" and said it aimed at damaging Iranian-Turkish relations.
At a news conference in Ankara on Thursday, Lapid thanked his host Turkey for helping abort a suspected Iranian plot against Israelis in Istanbul and said the effort was still underway.
Khatibzadeh was quoted in a ministry tweet as saying Lapid's "ridiculous" allegation was a "pre-designed scenario to destroy relations between the two Muslim countries," referring to Turkey and Iran.
On Thursday, Turkish media reported that Turkey had detained suspects allegedly working for an Iranian intelligence cell that planned to kidnap and assassinate a former Israeli ambassador and tourists visiting or living in Istanbul.
"MİT [the national intelligence organization] and police have received information that kidnappings and killings were planned against Israelis living or visiting as tourists in Istanbul and against a former Israeli ambassador and his wife who were staying at a hotel in the Beyoğlu district," the Hurriyet Daily News reported.
The report said a former Israeli ambassador and his wife were staying in a hotel in Istanbul's Beyoglu district. Nearly 10 suspects, who were not all Iranian nationals, were detained in a raid on three houses. The intelligence agents were disguised as students, while members of Iran's Revolutionary Guards were undercover as businessmen and tourists to kidnap and to assassinate Israelis.
The Iranians had split into four groups of two assassins who could better track their Israeli targets. "The hitmen in the assassination team, who settled in two separate rooms on the second and fourth floors of a hotel in Beyoglu, were (detained) with a large number of weapons and ammunition," the local Turkish broadcaster IHA said. According to the report, "the intelligence agency of Israel, Mossad have taken the targeted citizens from their addresses and sent them to Tel Aviv on a private plane."
i24NEWS contributed to this report.
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