Iran rejects US allegation against president-elect as unfounded

Iran dismissed as unfounded the US allegation that Iranian President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was involved in taking US Embassy staff hostage in 1979, the official IRNA news agency reported on Saturday.

"As it has been previously announced and the US sources confirmed, the president-elect had played no role in the takeover," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi was quoted as saying.

Several former American hostages said in late June that they remembered Ahmadinejad took part in the hostage-taking, an accusation denied repeatedly by the Iranian government and Ahmadinejad himself.

The White House spokesman Scott McClellan said on Thursday that Ahmadinejad was a leader of the seizure.

However, the New York Times on Friday quoted an unnamed US official as saying that a recent CIA scrutiny found no proof to support the allegation.

Asefi stressed that McClellan's remarks stemmed from the US disillusionment with Iran's independent policies and the Iranians' defiance to the White House appeals to boycott the presidential elections in June.

"The gigantic US security bodies are unable to investigate and reach conclusion on such simple and transparent issues," Asefi ridiculed.

In November 1979, five months after Iran's Islamic Revolution, a group of students took over the US Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.

The incident led Washington to break diplomatic ties with Tehran.

Ahmadinejad, the conservative Tehran mayor who won Iran's presidential elections on June 24, will be sworn in on Aug. 4.

Source: Xinhua