Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani has said that US sanctions on Tehran’s top diplomat are a sign that Washington is not true in its calls for holding talks with Iran.
“They are speaking of fresh negotiation while they have recently sanctioned our country’s chief executive for negotiations Mohammad Javad Zarif,” said Larijani on Saturday, adding, “That is a sign of their hypocrisy and untruthfulness.”
Larijani made the remarks in a joint press conference with his Afghan counterpart Fazl Hadi Moslem Yar in Tehran.
The Iranian parliament speaker, himself a former top negotiator in nuclear talks with world powers, said calls for new negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program comes against the backdrop of moves by the US to destroy a 2015 deal that was supposed to settle the issue after years of difficult talks.
In separate statements on Wednesday, the US departments of State and Treasury announced the imposition of sanctions against Zarif.
In his statement on blacklisting Zarif, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that the top Iranian diplomat is a “key enabler” of Iran’s policies throughout the region and the world.
The US Treasury Department also said in its statement that Zarif is Iran's “primary spokesperson around the world”.
The sanctions came more than a year after US President Donald Trump withdrew his country from the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers.
The move was followed by the re-imposition of a series of sanctions on Iran which had been lifted as part of the nuclear agreement.
Zarif, who led the talks that ended in the signing of Iran nuclear deal in Vienna in July 2015, has incessantly sought to discredit the Trump administration for its illegal way of dealing with Iran case and other global issues.