John Kerry Was Injured in Assassination Attempt, Not Bike Accident-Reported as Fiction!

John Kerry Was Injured in Assassination Attempt, Not Bike Accident-Reported as Fiction! 

Summary of eRumor:

Secretary of State John Kerry was gravely injured in an attempted assassination during a meeting with members of ISIS, not in a bike accident in France. 

The Truth:

John Kerry wasn’t wounded in an attempted ISIS assassination.

That claim went viral after John Kerry reportedly broke his leg near the border of Switzerland and France in June 2015. The Wall Street Journal reports that Kerry, who usually takes a bike with him on overseas trips, fractured his femur in an early morning crash:

“The accident comes at an crucial moment in the Obama administration’s long-running push to reach a final nuclear agreement with Iran. Mr. Kerry has made the Iran talks a personal priority, taking the U.S. lead on the negotiations.” 

Shortly after the crash, the Israel-based newspaper the Jerusalem Post reported that Iranian media had “erupted” with “unsubstantiated” rumors that John Kerry had been targeted and injured by ISIS assassins:

 “The latest Iranian report, first published by the Nasim news agency and subsequently picked up by dozens of Iranian news sites, based its information on “an American news website” which cites a Russian foreign intelligence service report as the source of the information.

According to the report in Nasim, Kerry secretly met with one of the leaders of Islamic State on Sunday. The meeting eventually led to an armed clash and an attempt to assassinate the US secretary of state.

Kerry’s meeting, in which the alleged assassination attempt took place, was with Gulmurod Khalimov, a senior Tajik police commander, trained in the United States, who announced his defection to Islamic State in a video released last week, the report states.

Having received training from the US State Department previously, Khalimov was well aware of State Department security procedures and he used the knowledge to get another member of his entourage into the secret meeting with Kerry, with the intention of assassinating him, the report claims.

The report cited communications intercepted by Russian intelligence from France, the US and Switzerland as confirming that two other people were shot in the incident, one of them fatally.

The story of Kerry breaking his femur in a bicycle accident in Switzerland was then concocted to hide the real source of his ‘grave injuries,’ according to the report.”

The Jerusalem Post report, which didn’t provide a link to the Nasim news agency story it had cited, quickly went viral. Other news sites repeated the Jerusalem Post’s account without citing the original Iranian news stories that had “erupted” with the conspiracy theory.

There’s no sign of John Kerry’s attempted assassination on leading Iranian news sites like Iran Daily, Tehran Times and Nasim news agency. Those sites may have deleted the story and scrubbed away all traces of its existence, or it may have never appeared in Iranian news at all.

The State Department released a photo of John Kerry resting in Boston hospital with his right leg extended days after the conspiracy theory went viral. The photo seems to dispel rumors that Kerry had been “gravely injured” or was on the verge of death.