Khamenei plays down protests: Iran’s foes exploiting plane tragedy

Tehran: Iran’s supreme leader said on Friday that demonstrations at home over its accidental downing of a Ukrainian airliner were unrepresentative of the Iranian people and accused the country’s enemies of exploiting it for propaganda purposes.

Leading the main weekly Muslim prayers in Tehran for the first time since 2012, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the January 8 downing was a "bitter" tragedy but should not be allowed to overshadow the "sacrifice" of one of Iran’s most storied commanders, assassinated in a US drone strike in Baghdad.

His sermon came after a traumatic month for Iran in which the country had appeared on the brink of war with the United States before mistakenly shooting down the Ukrainian jet with the loss of all 176 people on board.

"The plane crash was a bitter accident, it burned through our heart," Khamenei said in an address punctuated by cries of "Death to America" from the congregation.

"But some tried to... portray it in a way to forget the great martyrdom and sacrifice" of Major General Qasem Soleimani, the assassinated head of the foreign operations arm of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards.

Khamenei said Iran’s enemies had seized on the plane tragedy in a bid to undermine the Islamic republic.

"Our enemies were as happy about the plane crash as we were sad ... happy that they found something to question the Guards, the armed forces, the system," he said.

The air disaster triggered scattered protests in Tehran and other cities, but they appeared smaller than a nationwide wave of demonstrations prompted by a fuel price hike in November. At least 300 people died in a crackdown by security forces after those demonstrations, according to Amnesty International.

On Friday, anti-riot police staged a massive deployment in Tehran, an AFP correspondent said. Khamenei said the protesters were unrepresentative of the Iranian people as a whole, who had turned out in their hundreds of thousands for Soleimani’s funeral.