Iran president again raises doubts about September 11 attacks

Tehran  -  Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday again raised doubts about the official US version of the September 11, 2001 suicide airplane attacks in the United States.

Criticising the current "global management" ruling the countries' affairs, Ahmadinejad accused Western powers including the United States of creating pre-planned incidents so as to attack other countries.

"Four-five years ago a suspicious incident happened in New York. A building collapsed and they said that 3,000 people had been killed but their names never published," Ahmadinejad said in his speech to a public rally in the holy Iranian city of Qom.

"Under this pretext they (the United States) attacked Afghanistan and Iraq and since then a million people have been killed," he added, without elaborating who was behind the attacks nearly 7 years ago.

It was the third time the controversial president raised questions about the attacks, starting on April 8 when he raised the theme for the first time during his speech at a ceremony of Iran's "national day of nuclear technology" in Tehran.

Ahmadinejad, who had been describing the Holocaust as a "myth" and raising doubts over the scale of the mass killing of Jews during the World War II, has recently started to raise doubts over the number of victims of the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001.

Tehran and Washington have had no diplomatic relations since the seizure and occupation of the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979, after which US diplomats were held hostage for over 400 days.

Ahmadinejad's claim that the names were "never published" runs counter to the fact that on the internet, several websites contain extensive lists of the names of the victims of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. (dpa)