- TEHRAN (AFP) - Former president
Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani raised the spectre Friday of possible nuclear
conflict in the Middle East.
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- Rafsanjani, speaking at the weekly Muslim prayers in
Tehran, said that because Israel does not have enough soldiers to defend
itself, Western powers had "provided her with unconventional arms
of mass destruction, chemical and nuclear."
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- "The use of an atomic bomb against Israel would
totally destroy Israel, while (the same) against the Islamic world would
only cause damage. Such a scenario is not inconceivable," he said.
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- Rafsanjani, who heads Iran's powerful Expediency Council,
said that "if the Islamic world armed itself with the same arms, then
that equilibrium would be broken".
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- But "we do not want the world to fall victim to
insecurity, and we do not want the confrontation ... to turn into World
War Three. That is the worst that could happen."
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- He was speaking at Tehran University, where tens of thousands
of demonstrators converged Friday in a march of solidarity with the Palestinian
uprising against Israeli occupation.
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- President Mohammed Khatami, as well as a number of cabinet
ministers, MPs and other leading figures, participated in the march.
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- Similar marches were held across the country to mark
"World Qods (Jerusalem) Day," instituted in 1980 by the late
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of Iran's Islamic republic.
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