Iran media says Soleimani family denies links to pair arrested in US

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Soleimani

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Iranian media on Saturday quoted two daughters of slain former Iranian covert operations chief Qassem Soleimani denying that two Iranian women arrested in the United States were their relatives.

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Earlier, the US State Department had announced that a niece and a grand-niece of Soleimani had been arrested and stripped of their US residency. The statement identified the niece as Hamideh Soleimani Afshar. Her daughter was not named.

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But, according to the Iranian news agency Fars, Soleimani’s daughter Zeinab said: “The US State Department’s claim is a lie: the people arrested in the United States have no connection to the family.”

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Iranian state TV cited another daughter, Narjes, a member of Tehran’s Islamic City Council, as saying: “To this day, no member of the family nor any relative of Martyr Soleimani has resided in the United States.”

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Soleimani, an Iranian general who led the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ foreign operations arm, was killed in a US drone strike while he was in the Iraqi capital Baghdad in January 2020 — the final year of President Donald Trump’s first term in the White House.

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AFP

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