Tehran has denounced new USA sanctions imposed over Iran’s ballistic-missile program, claiming that the sanctions “have no legal or moral legitimacy” because of Washington’s arms sales to other countries in the Middle East.
Advertisement
U.S. sanctions imposed on Iranian entities as punishment for a recent ballistic missile test are illegitimate, the Islamic Republic has said.
“We can confirm that our detained USA citizens have been released and that those who wished to depart Iran have left”, the State Department said earlier Sunday in a statement.
During his speech, the president also said that a fifth US citizen student, Matthew Trevithick, imprisoned by Iran was released as well separately Saturday.
Combined with closer IAEA oversight, this will make it extremely hard for Iran to make a nuclear weapon, and the limits on the size of Iran’s activities remain in place for at least a decade.
Saturday’s developments brought to fruition a deal struck last summer on the 18th day of last-ditch talks in Vienna, capped more than two years of wrangling between Iran and the U.S., China, Russia, Germany, France and the United Kingdom.
“The fact of the matter is that this tells us everything we need to know about the Iranian regime. They don’t trust us”, he said.
“Fundamentally, the prisoner release is a testament to how willing governments are to negotiate with terrorists; they just don’t want to call it that”, said Danielle Pletka, senior vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Also Monday, Yukiya Amano, the head of the world’s nuclear watchdog, said Iran has agreed to strengthen its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The president’s speech came at a time when his government is lifting billions of dollars in global sanctions on Iran as part of the worldwide nuclear accord. “We’ll know if Iran ever tries to break out”. A fourth detainee identified by USA officials as Nosratollah Khosravi-Roodsari was also part of the deal.
The Obama administration reportedly delayed imposing new sanctions on Iran after the country’s foreign minister warned that such a move would derail negotiations for a prisoner exchange that was announced over the weekend.
Many local Iranian-Americans who gathered in Westwood said they were encouraged by the deal.
Advertisement
“We Iranians have reached out to the world… have opened a new chapter in the relations of Iran with the world”, the official IRNA news agency quoted Rouhani as saying.
