TEHRAN — Iran urged the United States Saturday to stop its addiction
to sanctions against the Islamic republic and accused President Joe Biden of
following the same "dead end" policies as Donald Trump.
اضافة اعلان
Foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh made his remarks a day after
the US Treasury announced financial sanctions against four Iranians accused of
planning the kidnapping in the US of an American journalist of Iranian descent.
"Washington must understand that it has no other choice but to abandon
its addiction to sanctions and show respect, both in its statements and in its
behavior, towards Iran," Khatibzadeh said in a press release.
On Friday, the Treasury announced
sanctions against "four Iranian
intelligence operatives" involved in a campaign against Iranian dissidents
abroad.
According to a US federal indictment in mid-July, the intelligence officers
tried in 2018 to force Masih Alinejad's Iran-based relatives to lure her to a
third country to be arrested and taken to Iran to be jailed.
When that failed, they allegedly hired US private investigators to monitor
her over the past two years.
Khatibzadeh
in July called the American charges "baseless and absurd", referring
to them as "Hollywood scenarios".
Under Trump's presidency, Washington unilaterally withdrew from the 2015
nuclear agreement between Tehran and six major powers.
The
multilateral deal offered Iran relief from sanctions in return for curbs on its
nuclear program.
It was torpedoed by Trump's decision to withdraw the United States from it
in 2018.
Biden has said he wants to reintegrate Washington into the pact, but talks
in Vienna that began in April have stalled since the ultra-conservative Ibrahim
Raisi won Iran's presidential election in June.
At the end of August, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused Biden's
administration of making the same demands as his predecessor in talks to revive
the accord.
And on Tuesday, Iran's new Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian suggested
that the Vienna talks would not resume for two or three months.
Tehran is demanding the lifting of all sanctions imposed or reimposed on it
by the US since 2017.
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