TEHRAN, Jan 9: Iran on Wednesday accused the United States of “clumsily” fabricating footage claiming to show Iranian speedboats harassing US ships, as tensions rose amid President George Bush’s visit to the region.

“The pictures that the Pentagon broadcast of the naval incident are file pictures and the voices have all been fabricated,” the Fars news agency quoted a senior commander in the Revolutionary Guards as saying.

The Pentagon released a video and audio tape on Tuesday that it said confirmed US charges that Iranian speedboats swarmed around US warships in the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday and radioed a threat to blow them up.

“The voices and pictures broadcast by the Pentagon about the latest incident have been fabricated so clumsily that the pictures and voices in the video are not even synchronized,” added the source.

“That fact that it is a fake is clear to all.” Before arriving in Israel, Iran’s arch enemy, on his first visit to the country as president, Bush lashed out at Tehran for what he described as a “provocative act” in the strategic waterway.

“We viewed it as a provocative act. It is a dangerous situation and they should not have done it, pure and simple,” Bush declared.

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley also warned Iran against any repetition, saying the incident “came very close to resulting in an altercation between our forces and their forces.

“They’ve got to be very careful about this, because if it happens again, they are going to bear the consequences of that incident,” he said.

“And we think the Iranians need to be on notice that they are fishing in troubled waters here.”

The video, which the Pentagon said was taken from the bridge of the destroyer USS Hopper, showed fast boats approaching the warships at high speeds and racing around the Hopper, the USS Port Royal and the USS Ingraham.

A man’s voice is heard in an audio recording speaking in English amid a sailor’s urgent warnings to stay clear of the ship.

“I am coming to you... You will explode in a few minutes,” the voice is heard to say.

Iranian officials had already dismissed the US version of the incident as anti-Iran propaganda ahead of Bush’s visit to the Middle East, saying what happened was an everyday occurrence.

The Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s elite military unit, have said that their naval forces merely identified the US vessels before both sides went on their way without any disturbance.

It was Iran’s Revolutionary Guards who in March last year seized 15 British sailors and marines in Gulf waters and held them at a secret location before releasing them in Tehran two weeks later.—AFP