Rice warns Iran against 'provocations' after naval confrontation

Rice warns Iran against 'provocations' after naval confrontation

	Published : Tue, 08 Jan 2008 09:46 By : Agencies Print this Story

JERUSALEM (Thomson Financial) - US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned Tehran in an interview published on Tuesday that it should cease its 'provocations' after Iranian vessels confronted US warships in the Gulf.

'Iran should not engage in such provocations,' Rice said in an interview to the Jerusalem Post and the Ynet website in Israel after Washington said armed Iranian speedboats had threatened three US warships in the Strait of Hormuz.

'That's what it was and it needs to stop. The US is going to defend its interests. It's going to defend its allies,' Rice was quoted as saying.

Iran is 'the single greatest threat to the kind of Middle East we all want to see,' she added.

The weekend incident, in which the Iranian boats radioed a threat to blow up the US ships, according to US officials, sent tensions rising ahead of the US President George W Bush's visit to the region.

But Iran on Tuesday rejected the US version of events, saying the encounter was a routine question of identification that ended with nothing special to report.

'No special engagement took place between the Guards and the foreign side,' Ali Reza Tangsiri, commander of the Guards naval forces in the region, told the Mehr news agency.

He added that the Guards naval forces have a right to control and identify 'any vessel entering Persian Gulf waters' to the northwest.

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