By Desire Emmanuel with Agency Reports
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the firebrand former Iranian president who gained international notoriety by calling for Israel’s erasure and denying the Holocaust, has reportedly been killed in Saturday’s military strikes, The Guardian of UK reported on Sunday, quoting local media.
Several Iranian outlets ran reports confirming Ahmadinejad’s death on Sunday after it had initially been reported as confirmed by ILNA, a semi-official news agency.
ILNA later retreated somewhat from its original report in a later post that was headlined “Is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad martyred?”
The later report cited an unnamed source who the agency said had denied Ahmadinejad’s death “without providing further information.”
The original report, which ILNA said was based on “informed sources,” said the former president was killed in strikes on his home in the Narmak district of Tehran.
The report was picked up by the websites of several Iranian newspapers, including Shargh and Etemad, before the agency qualified it with a question mark.
Earlier reports on Saturday suggested Ahmadinejad’s team of bodyguards had been killed in the strikes but that his fate was unknown. His Wikipedia page had been updated on Sunday to refer to him in the past tense and suggest he was deceased.
The populist Ahmadinejad was a dominant and highly controversial figure in Iranian politics during his eight-year presidency who also repeatedly generated international headlines.
Months after his election in 2005, he triggered outrage at a conference in Tehran by saying Israel should be “erased from the pages of time” – a quote that was widely translated into English as “wiped off the map.”
He later dismissed the Holocaust as a “myth” and was the driving force behind a 2006 “scientific” conference ostensibly aimed at investigating the evidence for the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis during the second world war, but tendentiously concluding that it did not happen.
He was believed to have been the favoured candidate of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who himself was killed in Saturday’s strikes carried out by Israel.
