TEHRAN (FNA)- Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei rapped the US officials for rejecting demands to apologize to the Japanese people for nuking the two cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"When people say to them, they should apologize for the Hiroshima incident, they answer, 'No, we will not apologize'," Ayatollah Khamenei's tweeter page quoted him as saying on May 5, addressing the Iranian officials and people in Tehran.


 



 
"The stream of ignorance and tyranny kills hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima with atomic bombs but after several years, isn�t yet ready to apologize," Ayatollah Khamenei said.


He also lashed out at Washington for destroying the infrastructures of Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries and not compensating for their deeds.


 



 
His remarks came as Barack Obama will later this month become the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima, the site of America�s devastating nuclear attack which killed 140,000 people.


The White House confirmed the historic move in a statement Tuesday after speculation that the president would include the city in his itinerary as part of his 10th trip to Asia.


The US dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima in 1945 towards the close of the Pacific leg of the global conflict, as Japanese forces were all but defeated.


Some 140,000 people were killed from the direct blast and radioactive fallout when America detonated an atomic bomb over the city on August 6, 1945. Around 90 percent of the city was destroyed in the resulting inferno.


Just days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, claiming 80,000 lives.


However, the outgoing US president will not offer any kind of official US apology for the devastating bombing.


"The president intends to visit to send a much more forward-looking signal about his ambition for realizing the goal of a planet without nuclear weapons," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters on Tuesday.


But many people on both sides of the Pacific Ocean want him to go further and formally apologize. Not going to happen, says the White House.


Secretary of State John Kerry visited Hiroshima in April, becoming the first US secretary of state to visit the city, but offered no apology for the atomic bombings.





By Fars News Agency