Iran skyjacking plot hatched in Israel

A top Iranian military official says the recent attempt to hijack an IranAir plane was planned by Israel to overshadow the Lebanese premier’s visit to Tehran.

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri arrived in the Iranian capital of Tehran for a three-day visit on Saturday.

In his first visit to Tehran as the Lebanese prime minister, Hariri is scheduled to hold talks with senior Iranian officials, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about bilateral and regional issues.

Not everybody accepts the risk of such an “obvious terrorist attack” unless they have a “major objective in mind,” the head of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC)’s public relations department, Commander Ramezan Sharif, said on Sunday.

On Friday, an Iranian man equipped with a “cold weapon” claimed he had planted bombs on the IranAir flight number 517 en route to Damascus from Tehran and tried to hijack the plane.

The man was arrested by flight security onboard and no bomb was found on the airliner after careful search.

“The president’s recent trip to Lebanon, was a regional defeat for the Zionist regime [of Israel]…,” Fars News Agency quoted Sharif as saying.

“The Zionist regime who planned on implicating Hezbollah for the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, suffered a defeat after this trip (Ahmadinejad’s visit to Lebanon) and following the revelations made by Hezbollah.” Sharif added.

Hariri was killed alongside more than 20 other people in a massive car bomb blast in Beirut on February 14, 2005.

Western-backed parties in Lebanon accused Syria and the resistance movement of involvement in Hariri’s assassination, a claim rejected by both Damascus and Hezbollah.

“… This is why Israel intended to use its mercenaries in the recent skyjacking affair to create a media hype against Iran,” the Iranian commander added.

Sharif went on to note that since the IRGC took over flight security in 1984, it has thwarted more than 130 attempts to hijack Iranian planes.