Kerry Hurt In ISIS Assassination Attempt, According To Iranian News Outlets

Photo Credit: Telegraph

 

Tehran, Iran – Iranian media erupted on Wednesday with an unsubstantiated rumor that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was not injured earlier this week in a simple fall from his bicycle in Switzerland, but rather that he was the target of an assassination attempt while meeting with Islamic State terrorists.

The Iranian media has been known to report “conspiracy theories” in the past, such as a September report that Israel was spearheading a dangerous global plot to spread the Krav Maga martial art worldwide and a December report that Israel was building settlements in Iraq.

The latest Iranian report, first published by the Nasim news agency and subsequently picked up by dozens of Iranian news sites, based its information on “an American news website” which cites a Russian foreign intelligence service report as the source of the information. According to the report in Nasim, Kerry secretly met with one of the leaders of the Islamic State on Sunday. The meeting eventually led to an armed clash and an attempt to assassinate the U.S. Secretary of State.

Kerry’s meeting, in which the alleged assassination took place, was with Gulmurod Khalimov, a senior Tajik police commander, trained in the United States, who announced his defection to Islamic State in a video released last week, the report states.

Having received training from the U.S. State Department previously, Khalimov was well aware of State Department security procedures and he used the knowledge to get another member of his entourage into the secret meeting with Kerry, with the intention of assassinating him, the report claims.

The report cited communications intercepted by Russian intelligence from France, the U.S. and Switzerland as confirming that two other people were shot in the incident, one of them fatally. The story of Kerry breaking his femur in a bicycle accident in Switzerland was then concocted to hide the real source of his “grave injuries,” according to the report.