Floyd killing shows ‘true face’ of US: Khamenei

TEHRAN: The police killing of unarmed African-American George Floyd shows the "true face" of the United States and its oppression of the peoples of the world, including its own, Iran´s supreme leader said Wednesday.

"The fact that a policeman has cold-bloodedly pressed his knee on the throat of a black man until he died and that other policemen watched on without doing anything is nothing knew," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a televised speech. "It is the true face of America, it´s what it has always done all over the world -- in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other countries, and before that in Vietnam. "It is the normal course of action of the United States, it´s the true face of their regime,” Khamenei said.

“These are realities that have always been camouflaged or hidden, but they are not new,” he said in a speech on the 31st anniversary of the death of his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

“Thank God, (US leaders) have already been discredited by their actions — their handling of the coronavirus has discredited and shamed them around the world,” Khamenei said of the 106,000 deaths from COVID-19 already registered in the United States.

Iran had itself faced strong criticism from its arch-foe the United States when it was reeling from one of the world´s highest COVID-19 death tolls earlier this year.