of working hand-in-hand with Israel to murder Iranian nuclear scientists.
Iran last week summoned Azerbaijani Ambassador Javan-shir Akhundov and accused Azerbaijan of assisting Israel’s intelligence agency in killing Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, the 32-year-old nuclear scientist who was killed last month after a bomb placed on his car exploded. The scientist was working at the Natanz enrichment facility in central Iran.
“Some of the terrorists linked to the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists have traveled to Azerbaijan… [where they are] helped to travel to Tel Aviv,” the state news agency quoted the Iranian Foreign Ministry as saying.
A Fars news agency report added that Ambassador Akhun-dov was also rebuked by Iranian officials for the mistreatment of Iranian officials in Azerbaijan and Iranian trucks having difficulty entering Azerbaijan.
But, in addition to flatly denying the charges, the Azer-baijani Foreign Ministry alleged the complaints are a response to Baku’s note earlier this year after it arrested two men allegedly linked to Iranian intelligence and suspected of plotting to kill Israelis.
“It is a response note to an Azerbaijani note which was about Iranian security services’ attempted terrorist attack against two Israeli citizens in Baku,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Elman Abdullayev said. “This Iranian note is slander.”
Oil-rich Azerbaijan maintains friendly relations with Israel and trades oil for military hardware. Relations between the two countries are compounded not only by these ties but also by the fact that the mostly Muslim country is ethnically related to Iran’s Azeri minority, which outnumbers its ethnic kin in the country of Azerbaijan.
Over the years, relations between the two countries have deteriorated as Azerbaijan has repeatedly accused Iran of supporting Muslim radicals in the ex-Soviet republic.