Ahmadinejad calls 9/11 'big fabrication'

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday called the September 11 attacks on the United States a big fabrication that was used to justify the US war on terrorism, the official IRNA news agency reported.
Ahmadinejad, who often rails against the West and Israel, made the comment in a meeting with Intelligence Ministry personnel.
Ahmadinejad described the destruction of the twin towers in New York on September 11, 2001 as a complicated intelligence scenario and act, IRNA reported.
He added: The September 11 incident was a big fabrication as a pretext for the campaign against terrorism and a prelude for staging an invasion against Afghanistan. He did not elaborate.
Meanwhile, a Western proposal for fresh UN sanctions on Iran includes a call for restricting new Iranian banks abroad and urges vigilance against the Islamic Republics central bank, diplomats said on Friday.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, Western diplomats familiar with negotiations on the draft proposal - which Washington worked on with Britain, France and Germany and then shared with Russia and China - said they were no longer pushing for an official U.N. blacklisting of the central bank.
The draft also calls for restrictions on new Iranian banks abroad, which would make it difficult for Tehran to skirt a global crackdown on transactions with existing Iranian financial institutions by setting up new ones.
We will be looking for a tightening of restrictions of new Iranian bank activity overseas, a diplomat told Reuters.
Another diplomat said urging vigilance about Irans central bank in the US-drafted proposal should be more acceptable to Russia and China than blacklisting it, which would have made it difficult for anyone to invest in Iran.
The idea is to call for strengthened vigilance regarding transactions linked to the Iranian central bank, which the EU and US and others can then use as the basis for implementing their own tougher restrictions on (such) transactions, a second diplomat said.
Only one Iranian bank - Bank Sepah - is blacklisted under an array of UN sanctions spelled out in three resolutions adopted by the Security Council in 2006, 2007 and 2008. The Council has issued warnings about two others - Bank Melli and Bank Saderat - but has not blacklisted them.
The draft does not call for sanctions against Irans oil and gas industries as an earlier French draft had proposed. The new draft also targets Iranian shipping firms and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and firms linked to it. The measures would restrict insurance and reinsurance coverage of cargo shipments in and out of Iran, diplomats said.
It would also expand the restrictions on arms trade with Iran into a full arms embargo, including a global inspection regime similar to one in place against North Korea.
The diplomats said Russias initial reaction was negative.
Russia says the draft does not correspond to their idea of what the sanctions should be and they reject many of the measures in the latest draft, a diplomat said.
China has not reacted and has so far refused to engage in substantive negotiations on a fourth round of UN sanctions against Tehran.