Iran rejects allegations of sending weapons to Sudan

March 23, 2012 (KHARTOUM) – Iran has denied what it described as “false” reports by the West on Tehran’s provision of military support to Sudan.

Ramin Mehmanparast, the official spokesperson of Iran’s Foreign Ministry, on Friday said that Western media reports accusing his country of sending weapons to Sudan were “false and suspicious.”

He pointed out that his country’s foreign policy has always aimed at prevention of war and accused Western powers of seeking to deflect attention from their failures in implementing sanctions on Iran.

“The dominant powers publish such lies in order to cover up their weakness and failure in implementing sanctions on the Iranian nation and prevent the daily and increasing advancement of our country in various arenas,” Mehmanparast said, as quoted by the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA).

It is not clear to which allegations Tehran is responding but rebels fighting the Sudanese government in the border regions of South Kordofan and Blue Nile recently claimed that members of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards have arrived in the two states to fight alongside government forces.

Khartoum and Tehran signed on 7 March 2008 an agreement on military cooperation. At the time, Sudanese defense minister Abdul Rahim Mohamed Hussien said that his country “imports weapons from all countries except Western countries.”

Ra’y al-Sha’b, a pro-opposition Sudanese daily, was suspended in 2010 after it published a report alleging that Iran had constructed a weapon factory in Sudan aiming to supply Islamists insurgents in Somalia and Yemeni Shiite rebels as well as Islamist Palestinian movement Hamas.

Sudan is under a UN Security Council’s embargo on all imports of weapons for use in the country’s western region of Darfur. A UN panel of experts recommended in 2007 that the embargo be extended for the entire country.

(ST)