US insists it met with Iran over alleged plot

Despite a denial from Tehran, the United States insisted Friday it had direct contact with Iran over the alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington. "I will again confirm that we did meet with the Iranians," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters after saying that the meeting took place on Tuesday, and not on Wednesday as she had originally claimed. "They know that very well, and any efforts on their part to deny it speaks again to how truthful they are about any of these sorts of matters." Nuland again declined to say where the meeting took place. In Tehran, the ISNA and Fars news agencies reported Friday that the Iranian mission to the United Nations denied "direct contact" between Iranian and American officials. adding: "No such contacts have occurred." "There are no such contacts, and this office has no information in this regard," the Iranian mission was cited as saying. On Thursday, Nuland told reporters that Washington "had direct contact with Iran" about the alleged plot, adding that the exchange took place on Wednesday and not in Iran. A senior US State Department official told reporters later that the interaction was a US initiative. US President Barack Obama demanded answers from the top echelons of the Iranian government over the alleged plot and said the facts of the plan were not in dispute. Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a speech Thursday that appeared to be prompted by, but did not directly address, US allegations of a thwarted Tehran-sponsored plot, said the West is trying but failing to instill "Iranophobia." "The repeat of ineffective and stupid methods by hapless and distracted policy makers in the West (to spread) Iranophobia will again bear no result," he said. Iran has strongly denied any involvement in what the US says was a plot by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' elite Quds force to kill the Saudi ambassador by hiring assassins from a Mexican drug cartel for $1.5 million. News of the alleged plot has sent tensions soaring between Tehran and Washington, foes for more than 30 years ever since Islamic students took US diplomats hostage in their embassy in Tehran after Iran's 1979 revolution.