Twitter said on Friday that it had permanently banned an account connected to the office of Iran’s supreme leader, shortly after the account posted a photo showing former President Donald Trump playing golf in the shadow of a giant drone.
The post on the @khamenei_site Twitter account late Thursday warned there was no escape from payback for the US strike outside Baghdad airport which killed Iran’s foreign military operations chief General Qassem Soleimani and his Iraqi lieutenant.
“Revenge is inevitable. Soleimani’s killer and the man who gave the orders must face vengeance,” it said.
In response to a request for comment from The Associated Press, a Twitter spokesman said that the tweet had violated the company’s “abusive behaviour policy,” and that the account had violated its “manipulation and spam policy, specifically the creation of fake accounts,” without elaborating.
Other accounts thought to be tied to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s office remained active.
However, Khamenei’s office runs several accounts and the others were still working, including his main account, which he regularly uses to call for the destruction of the Jewish state.
Twitter has refused Israeli pleas to close such accounts and ban the Iranian leader’s genocidal comments, to no avail. Last year, a Twitter official told MKs those tweets did not breach its policy, since they were regarded as “saber-rattling.”
Trump left office on Wednesday and flew straight to his Mar-a-Lago golf club in Florida, without attending the inauguration of his successor US President Joe Biden.
Iranian officials have pledged repeatedly that Soleimani will be avenged.
Earlier this month, on the first anniversary of his killing, judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi warned that not even Trump was “immune from justice” and that Soleimani’s killers would “not be safe anywhere in the world.”
Soleimani was the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ powerful Quds Force, which has been designated a terrorist organization and accused of aiding Shiite forces that killed thousands of American troops in Iraq. He also backed Shiite terror groups like Hezbollah and forces fighting in Syria and Yemen.
