Tehran: ‘Terrorists’ Damage Gas Pipeline to Turkey, Halting Flow

The head of Iran’s state-supervised natural gas company says a pipeline supplying Iranian gas was sabotaged in Turkey, requiring the flow to be cut off. “This morning, terrorists attacked a natural gas pipeline inside Turkey near Iran’s Bazargan border with Turkey,” Mehdi Jamshidi-Dana, director of the firm, told state television on Tuesday. He added that suspicions had fallen on members of the PKK, an organization of ethnic Kurds in Turkey who are seeking autonomy. The PKK has been deemed a terrorist group by Ankara and Washington, among other capitals. “The pipeline has exploded several times in the past,” he told IRNA, the state-run news agency, implying that the Kurdish group was seen as having been responsible for those incidents as well. TRT, the Turkish public broadcast network, said the cause of the blast was not known. Jamshidi told IRNA that Turkish border guards had departed the area due to the coronavirus pandemic.