UK gears up for Iran face-off

Press TV
January 25, 2012

UK Defense Secretary Philip Hammond says Britain could send military reinforcements to the Persian Gulf in the wake of a military confrontation with Iran.

Speaking at a press conference in London on Tuesday, he said two British and French warships and the American aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln had entered the Persian Gulf on Sunday.

Hammond added that the decision to send British HMS Argyll sent a “clear signal” to Tehran, The Telegraph reported.

When asked if more resources could be sent, Hammond said, “The UK has a contingent capability to reinforce that presence should at any time it be considered necessary to do so.”

UK defense ministry declined to offer further details on what assets and personnel are currently in the Persian Gulf.

Anti-Iran measures and war rhetoric provoked by the United States and its Western allies are aimed to deny Iran’s right of having peaceful nuclear program.

Iran, as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has the legal right to develop nuclear capability for civilian purposes.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Iran’s nuclear facilities are under the constant surveillance of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) cameras. The agency’s inspectors have repeatedly traveled to Iran and inspected the country’s nuclear sites and held talks with officials at the sites. A high-ranking delegation of IAEA negotiators is also scheduled to visit Iran on Saturday, January 28.

Information obtained by the IAEA inspectors during visits to Iran’s nuclear sites has been abused, and the leakage of confidential information by the UN nuclear agency to the Western countries and the Israeli regime has led to all the recent assassination attempts against Iranian nuclear scientists.

On January 11, an unknown motorcyclist attached a magnetic bomb to the car of Iranian scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan near a college building of Allameh Tabatabaei University in Tehran. He was immediately killed and his driver, who sustained injuries, died a few hours later in a hospital.

Ahmadi Roshan was a chemical engineering graduate of Iran’s prominent Sharif University of Technology and served as the deputy director of marketing at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility.

He was not the first Iranian nuclear scientist targeted by a terrorist attack.

In November, 2010, Majid Shahriari, another scientist, was killed in a terrorist attack and Dr. Fereydoun Abbasi, the current head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, sustained some injuries in another attack.

Professor Masoud Ali-Mohammadi, a scholar at Tehran University, was also assassinated by a booby-trapped motorbike in the Iranian capital in January 2010.

This article was posted: Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 7:59 am

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