In reaction to Iran Supreme Leader's accusation that coronavirus could be a biological terror weapon against Iran on, the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that the "best biological defense would have been to tell the truth to the Iranian people."
"The best biological defense would have been to tell the truth about the Wuhan virus when it spread to Iran from China," he wrote in a tweet on Friday and said instead, Khamenei kept Mahan Air flights coming and going to the epicenter in China and jailed those who spoke out.
On Thursday, Ali Khamenei instructed the armed forces to set up a "health and treatment headquarters" to prevent further spread of the killer Covid-19 across the country and joined voices with the IRGC Chief Commander Major General Hossein Salami and other hardliners who have implicitly described the coronavirus epidemic as an American "biological attack."
In an apparently orchestrated move in the past ten days, Iranian hardliners and their affiliated media have been conducting a strong propaganda campaign to convince the public that the coronavirus crisis in the country is the result of a specific strain of the virus used for a "bio-terror attack" by the United States against Iran.
However, many including several lawmakers have alleged that Mahan Air, partly owned by the Revolutionary Guard, is responsible for the outbreak in the country by continuing flights to Wuhan and other Chinese cities despite a government order to cease its flights.
On Friday Bahram Parsaei, a member of the Parliament's Article 90 Committee which is responsible for probing citizens' complaints against government bodies, said the committee should investigate the role of Mahan Air to China after the coronavirus epidemic started in China. "If flights to China had stopped we would not have to deal with the costs [of the epidemic] today," he said.
