Iranian official says US cannot evade responsibility for alleged war crimes
Kazem Gharibabadi cites a UN fact-finding report on the Minab school attack and separate events in Lamerd.
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said the United States cannot evade responsibility for alleged war crimes in Minab and Lamerd. He cited an independent UN fact-finding committee’s report, which said there were reasonable grounds to believe US forces were responsible for an attack on a Minab primary school and classified it as a war crime. The supplied account contains differing casualty figures: Gharibabadi referred to 168 children, while the UN report was cited as saying 150 people, including 120 students, were killed.
TEHRAN — Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs, said the United States cannot evade responsibility for what he described as war crimes in Minab and Lamerd.
In a post on the social media platform X on Friday, Gharibabadi said history would not forget that a school in Minab had been stained with the blood of 168 children and that a sports field in Lamerd had become a site of mass civilian killings. He said the incidents constituted “clear war crimes,” rather than operational errors.
Gharibabadi also said the United States could not escape responsibility by withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council.
According to Iran’s IRNA news agency, experts from an independent UN fact-finding committee said in a report the previous day that there were reasonable grounds to believe US forces were responsible for an attack on the Shajareh Tayebeh primary school in Minab. The report said the attack killed 150 people, including 120 students.
The committee concluded that the attack amounted to an indiscriminate attack that killed civilians and damaged civilian infrastructure, and that it constituted a war crime under international law.