TEHRAN -- Iran’s foreign minister says the United States and the occupying regime of Israel slipped firearms past Iranian borders during the recent riots that took place across the Islamic Republic as means of wreaking havoc throughout the country.

Hussein Amir-Abdollahian made the remarks in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR), which is a network of around 900 public radio stations in the United States. The interview was conducted at the Iranian Foreign Ministry in Tehran by the radio channel’s host Mary Louise Kelly on Wednesday.

“American and Israeli armaments entered the country via some of our less stable neighbors,” he said.

“In fact, what they did was that they wreaked havoc among mobs and masses, and, in effect, resorted to the armaments in question,” the top diplomat noted.

The unrest broke out last year in Tehran and then spread across the country after the death of a young Iranian woman, named Mahsa Amini.

Amir-Abdollahian rejected the NPR’s claim that “tens of thousands” had been arrested during the riots, and that “hundreds of people have been killed.”

He rather put the number of the arrestees at “hundreds,” identifying those who had been rounded up as only “those who had had a hand in the street riots,” and affirming that no student had been apprehended either at the universities or on their premises.

Rejecting what the NPR host referred to as an alleged hundreds-strong death toll during the riots, Amir-Abdollahian asserted, “The number of the fatalities during the riots have not been stated correctly,” adding, “Despite intense tension during 

Amir-Abdollahian, meanwhile, addressed the issue of a recent decree by Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, which allowed the pardoning of a considerable number of those 

who had been arrested during the unrest, attributing the decree to the Leader’s “special attention to the issue of clemency and mercy.”
Hundreds were pardoned and released on the back of the decree, the foreign minister said, “save for those who have committed murder or other serious crimes.”
Still addressing the issue of the West’s excessive focus on the issue of the unrest in Iran, the senior diplomat asked how come Western media outlets did not accord the same amount of attention to the Zionist regime’s murder of Shireen Abu Akleh.
The Al Jazeera journalist was shot in the head and killed by Israeli army forces on May 11 while she was covering their raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the northern part of the Tel Aviv-occupied West Bank.