The Iranian regime’s Fars news agency, affiliated to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), announced on Monday that Maryam Rajavi, NCRI president-elect, had visited Israel on July 17, and was supposed to meet the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli authorities.
The agency cited as its source a series of tweets by the French Consul General in Jerusalem, Pierre Cochard. Screenshots of Mr. Cochard’s presumed twitter account accompanied the dispatch, as is normal with the mullahs’ lies and fake news.
“Lies by IRGC News Agency regarding my illusionary visit to Israel shows regime’s desperation and need for fake news against Iranian resistance,”
— Maryam Rajavi (@Maryam_Rajavi)
— Maryam Rajavi (@Maryam_Rajavi) July 23, 2019
Soon afterwards a reporter tweeted that the said account, ostensibly run by Pierre Cochard, was fake, and the French Consul General had no such account on twitter.
Meanwhile, official and non-official news agencies belonging to different repressive departments of the regime, like the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), began to reproduce the news in concert.
Later in the evening, the French Foreign Ministry issued an official statement entitled “Fake Twitter account on behalf of the Consul General of France in Jerusalem”, saying: “The Consul General of France in Jerusalem, Mr Pierre Cochard, has been subjected to an identity theft on the social network Twitter. Mr Pierre Cochard only communicates on Twitter, as well as other social networks, through the official accounts of the Consulate General of France in Jerusalem.”
The French Consulate General warned social network users to be most prudent with such claims.
The twitter account used for the repeated tweets was suspended later in the evening.
Several naïve journalists who are known apologists for the mullahs’ regime hastily retweeted the fake tweets, before it was revealed that the whole story was cooked in the MOIS to counter recent intensified activities by the MEK and the Iranian Resistance.
