INCIDENT FOLLOWS RECENT 'HOLOCAUST' REMARKS

Iranian president
escapes assassination attempt

NSNS  Tuesday, 3 January 2006

TEHRAN—Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad escaped unharmed from an assassination attempt, which claimed the lives of his driver and one of his bodyguards.

The attack occured near the city of Zabol in the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchestan, the same city where Ahmadinejad made his recent pronouncements questioning the Jewish "Holocaust."

"At 6:50 pm on Thursday [December 15, 2005], the lead car in the presidential motorcade confronted armed bandits and troublemakers on the Zabol-Saravan highway," an Iranian news source, Jomhouri Islami, reported.

"In the ensuing armed clash, the driver of the vehicle, who was an indigenous member of the security services, and one of the president's bodyguards died, while another bodyguard was wounded."

Opium-trafficking Baluchi tribesmen in the area are Sunni Muslims. Supported by "foreign elements" they have been waging a low-intensity, separatist insurgency against the Shia-dominated Iranian government.

Ahmadinejad was in the province to underscore Tehran's commitment to hold on to the region. The Iranian leadership fears the US presence in neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq as dangerous encirclement by allies of its mortal foe, Israel, which has threatened attacks on Iran's civilian nuclear energy program.

The attack on Ahmadinejad appears to be part of a concerted campaign against "Holocaust" skeptics. A number of Western revisionists, including Ernst Zündel, Germar Rudolf and David Irving have been arrested and imprisoned in recent months for publicly questioning the Jewish myth.