By Xinhua
Tehran : Iran on Thursday condemned the arrest of an Iranian national by U.S. troops in Iraq, saying the man was the head of a commercial delegation.
“Such an action by U.S. forces is a violation of international conventions and aims to destroy the ties between Iran and Iraq,” Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said in a statement.
The arrested man, identified as Farhadi, was the head of “border commercial transactions” from the Kermanshah province in western Iran, according to the Iranian foreign ministry’s statement.
He was “abducted” by U.S. forces on Thursday morning at the Hotel Palace in the northern Iraqi city of Sulaimaniyah, the statement said.
“The Iranian Embassy in Baghdad has handed over a protest note to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry” over the arrest, the Iranian foreign ministry said in the statement.
The Iranian delegation “had been officially invited by the governor of Sulaimaniyah and entered Iraq on Sept. 18, 2007,” it said.
The U.S. military claimed that the Iranian man was a member of the Quds Force, the covert operations arm of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and that he was suspected of involvement in smuggling explosives.