Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Mousavi has rejected as "baseless" allegations levelled by US officials about an air bridge between Iran and Venezuela operated by Mahan Air (W5, Tehran Mehrabad).
While Mousavi did not explicitly refer to Mahan Air, the airline recently operated a number of flights to Caracas Simón Bolivar and Las Piedras using its A340-600s. The flights, which are not scheduled services, have been operating since April 22 on a near-daily basis. The services prompted US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to call for a global ban on Mahan Air's overflights. Pompeo said that the flights by "the same terrorist airline that Iran uses to move weapons and fighters around the Middle East" must stop. He alleged the airline is carrying "unknown support" to the Latin American regime.
The Iranian authorities said in a counter statement that Pompeo's remarks were nothing more than an expression of "mounting US pressure on the Venezuelan government and for disrupting and interfering in the trade ties between Iran and Venezuela".
"Our assumption is that those planes that come from Iran are bringing things for the oil industry, and they return full of gold as a form of payment," US special representative for Venezuela Elliot Abrams added later.
Mousavi said that American efforts to block Iranian flights were "an attempt to obstruct the Venezuelan government's plans for reviving that country’s refineries and producing oil products, including gasoline".
The Iranian airline, although technically privately-owned, has been sanctioned by the US since 2013 for alleged close ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force, a government-linked Iranian militia.
