Donald Trump has revealed he is in direct negotiations with a senior Iranian figure he described as "the most respected as the leader" of the country — while the man officially installed as Supreme Leader remains out of public sight following the airstrike thatcritically wounded him.
After holding what he described as "very good and productive conversations" with Tehran, Trump stood down the threatenedassault on Iran's power grid— telling reporters a deal was within reach and could materialise in as little as five days.
Trump made clear the individual he was speaking with was not Mojtaba Khamenei — the son of the assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was appointed Supreme Leader by the regime's ruling clerics despite losing at least one leg and suffering serious internal injuries in the strike.
"No-one has heard from him, every once in a while we see a statement made but we don't know if he's living," Trump said of Mojtaba.
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The identity of Trump's Iranian interlocutor has been pieced together by Israeli intelligence. Axios correspondent Barak Ravid reports that the figure holding back-channel contact with Washington is parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf — a hardliner whose CV reads like a roll call of the regime's most controversial chapters.
He commanded the IRGC air force before entering politics, states the Sun, played a central role in suppressing the student uprising of July 1999, and has launched four unsuccessful bids for the presidency since 2005. Diplomatic sources reportedly say he could sit down with Trump's envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Islamabad before the week is out.
Ghalibaf has publicly branded reports of negotiations as "fake news."
In a post on what appears to be his X account, he said: "No negotiations have been held with the US, and fakenews is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US andIsraelare trapped."
Source: Daily Express :: World Feed
