Iran media says Soleimani family denies links to pair arrested in US

TEHRAN: Iranian media on Saturday quoted two daughters of slain former Iranian covert operations chief Qassem Soleimani denying that two Iranian women arrested in the United States were their relatives.

Earlier, the US State Department had announced that a niece and a grand-niece of Soleimani had been arrested and stripped of their US residency. The statement identified the niece as Hamideh Soleimani Afshar. Her daughter was not named.

But, according to the Iranian news agency Fars, Soleimani’s daughter Zeinab said: “The US State Department’s claim is a lie: the people arrested in the United States have no connection to the family.”

Iranian state TV cited another daughter, Narjes, a member of Tehran’s Islamic City Council, as saying: “To this day, no member of the family nor any relative of Martyr Soleimani has resided in the United States.”

Soleimani, an Iranian general who led the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ foreign operations arm, was killed in a US drone strike while he was in the Iraqi capital Baghdad in January 2020 — the final year of President Donald Trump’s first term in the White House.