CAIRO
Izzedine Khalil al-Jasim, a 33-year-old Syrian national, has said he does not have a slightest regret hurling shoes at Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
"I have thrown shoes at Ahmadinejad for Iranian government's backing for Assad regime and what I did was not enough. I would do the same thing again anywhere in the world," al-Jasim told The Anadolu Agency in Cairo where the Iranian leader came under the shoe attack on Wednesday.
Al-Jasim is seen in an exclusive Anadolu Agency video footage hurling shoes -- a major insult in the Muslim world -- at a smiling Ahmadinejad who shook hands with a crowd of supporters outside a mosque.
"I saw a group of young people carrying photos of Ahmadinejad, which really annoyed me. So I waited for him to come out from mosque. All despotic leaders have a complex about shoes. That's why I chose shoes," al-Jasim said.
Al-Jasim, once an Islamic preacher in Syria's embattled city of Aleppo, has studied theology at a Egypt university and now he writes a PhD dissertation.
"I haven't seen my three children and my wife in nine months. I could not get passports to bring them to Egypt here with me," he said.
Reporting by Ahmed Zakaria
