An Iranian government official denied on Monday that Tehran was involved in the assault on author Salman Rushdie, in remarks that were the country's first public comments on the attack. The comments by Nasser Kanaani, the spokesman of Iran's Foreign Ministry, come over two days after the attack on Rushdie in New York.

However, Iran has denied carrying out other operations abroad targeting dissidents in the years since the country's 1979 Islamic Revolution, despite prosecutors and Western governments attributing such attacks back to Tehran.