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Iran accuses the US of fabricating speedboat footage

Iran accused the US on Wednesday of "clumsily" fabricating footage claiming to show Iranian speedboats harassing US ships, as Washington issued a new warning to its archfoe on the first day of a Middle East visit by US President George W. Bush.

"The pictures that the Pentagon broadcast of the naval incident are file pictures and the voices have all been fabricated," Fars news agency quoted a senior commander in the Revolutionary Guards as saying.

The Pentagon released a video and audio tape on Tuesday that it said confirmed charges that Iranian speedboats swarmed around US warships in the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday and radioed a threat to blow them up.

"The voices and pictures broadcast by the Pentagon about the latest incident have been fabricated so clumsily that the pictures and voices in the video are not even synchronized," the Guards commander said. "That fact that it is a fake is clear to all."

Before arriving in Israel, Iran's arch enemy, Bush lashed out at Tehran for what he described as a "provocative act" in the strategic waterway.

"We viewed it as a provocative act. It is a dangerous situation and they should not have done it, pure and simple," Bush declared on his first visit to the Jewish state since taking office in 2001.

The Pentagon dismissed as "absurd" Iran's accusation that it had faked the video footage and warned that it was prepared to use force if its warships were threatened in international waters.

"In the future we will follow very formal, deliberate procedures for dealing with threats like this as we did in the past," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters in Washington. "We were fortunate that we did not have to escalate to the use of force, but as always we are prepared to if our vessels are threatened in international waters."

Whitman said Iran's questioning of the authenticity of the video "is absurd and factually incorrect and reflects a lack of seriousness with which they take this serious incident."

The video, which the Pentagon said was taken from the bridge of the destroyer USS Hopper, showed boats approaching the warships at high speeds and racing around the Hopper, the USS Port Royal and the USS Ingraham.

A man's voice is heard in an audio recording speaking in English amid a sailor's urgent warnings to stay clear of the ship.

"I am coming to you ... You will explode in a few minutes," the voice is heard to say.

Iranian officials had already dismissed the US version of the incident as anti-Iran propaganda ahead of Bush's visit to the Middle East, saying what happened was an everyday occurrence.

The Revolutionary Guards, Iran's elite military unit, has said that its naval forces merely identified the US vessels before both sides went on their way without any disturbance.

Bush -- who will also visit Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt during his tour -- is expected to urge Washington's Arab allies to pressure Iran over what he has called its "aggressive ambitions."

But key ally Saudi Arabia called on Wednesday for all sides to show restraint and said it was keen to maintain peaceful relations with Iran.

"Saudi Arabia is a neighbor of Iran in the Gulf, which is a small lake. We are keen that harmony and peace should prevail among states of the region," Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told reporters.

The Strait of Hormuz is a vital conduit for energy supplies, with about 20 percent to 25 percent of the world's crude oil supplies passing through from Gulf oil producers.

It was Iran's Revolutionary Guards who in March last year seized 15 British sailors and marines in Gulf waters and held them at a secret location before releasing them in Tehran two weeks later.

A recent US intelligence report that said Iran halted a nuclear weapons program in 2003 has momentarily taken the heat out of the atomic crisis. Washington still wants fresh UN Security Council action against Tehran.

However the incident in the Strait of Hormuz has underlined the tensions that remain between the two countries, which have had no diplomatic relations for almost three decades.
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