Ahmadinejad cuts short Armenia visit

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cut short his two-day visit to Armenia on Tuesday and returned to neighboring Iran, an Armenian presidential spokesman said.

The Armenian government had expected Ahmadinejad to address parliament and, in what was likely to cause controversy, plant a sapling at a memorial commemorating the victims of what Armenians consider genocide.

He also had planned to visit the 18th century Blue Mosque in central Yerevan, which was rebuilt with Iranian funding after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

But Ahmadinejad told Armenian President Robert Kocharian late Monday that he needed to skip Tuesday's planned events because of unexpected developments in Iran that needed immediate attention, Armenian presidential spokesman Viktor Sogomonian said. The spokesman gave no details.

No unexpected developments have been reported in Iran that could explain Ahmadinejad's early departure.

The visit to the genocide memorial was the most sensitive part of his agenda, and he may have wanted to avoid the ceremony there so as not to risk causing tensions in relations with Turkey.

Scholars view the World War I-era killing of 1.5 million Armenians, who were Christians, as the first genocide of the 20th century. But debate on a resolution in the U.S. Congress that would recognize the killings as genocide has angered Turkey, which says the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.

Ahmadinejad avoided taking sides on the issue Monday in a speech before Armenian university students, saying only that Iran condemns any crimes against humanity.

He has caused outrage in the past by suggesting that the Holocaust is a "myth" invented by Jews. An estimated 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

Ahmadinejad and Kocharian held talks Monday and struck several agreements to bolster economic ties between the two neighboring nations. They discussed plans to build a railway link and two hydroelectric power plants on the border river, Araks.

The projects are important for landlocked Armenia, which has struggled with power shortages and transport blockades since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Neighboring Azerbaijan and Turkey have shut their borders with Armenia in the wake of a conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway region of Azerbaijan controlled by ethnic Armenians.

Kocharian's spokesman said the president was not disturbed by Ahmadinejad's early departure because they had managed to cover all the necessary issues during their talks Monday.