Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has accused the West of deliberately destroying rain clouds headed for Iran as part of efforts to plunge the country into drought. The Iranian president’s latest outburst came as he made a speech addressing the problems caused by low rainfall trends, which experts say are threatening Iran’s agriculture.

‘Today our country is moving towards drought, which is partly unintentional due to industry and partly intentional, as a result of the enemy destroying the clouds moving towards our country and this is a war that Iran is going to overcome,’ said Mr Ahmadinejad in a speech in the Caspian Sea city of Gonbad-e Kavus to mark its registration as a Unesco World Heritage site.

Although Iran is recognized as having one of the world’s driest climates, the comments were the latest in a series of bizarre allegations of a Western conspiracy to turn the shortage into a major crisis.

In July, Hassan Mousavi, head of Iran’s cultural heritage organization and one of Mr Ahmadinejad’s vice-presidents, urged meteorological experts to investigate the possibility that the west was engineering a draught in southern Iran, traditionally one of the country’s most parched regions.

‘I feel that the world arrogance and colonization (Iranian official code language for the US and its allies) by using their technologies, are affecting the environmental situation in Iran,’ he said.

Specialists have recently warned that low rainfall has reached ‘undesirable levels’, producing officially-designated draught conditions in more than three-quarters of the country, reports the Daily Telegraph.

Last May, Mr Ahmadinejad made similar accusations while opening a dam in the Markazi province. Moments later it actually started to rain.

Mr Ahmadinejad has also accused European nations of deliberately emptying clouds to produce torrential storms in their own countries that would lead in turn to rain shortages in the Middle East.

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