NEW YORK: US president Donald Trump’s administration is considering slapping sanctions on Iranian individuals who are behind a crackdown on protesters in the biggest wave of anti-government anger Iran has seen since widespread rallies in 2009.
In an interview with the state-backed broadcaster VOA (Voice of America), deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran, Andrew Peek, said Washington was mulling targeted sanctions as well as working with international partners to censure Tehran.
“For our part, we will hold accountable those people or entities who are committing violence, from the top to the bottom, against the protesters,” Peek said. “That involves examining actions we can take against those individuals, like sanctions and other means.”
Trump has used Twitter to warn he is “watching” events in the Islamic Republic, where the security services are cracking down on a wave of protests against rising prices, corruption and Iran’s costly military interventions in Syria and Yemen.
“The people of Iran are finally acting against the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime,” Trump tweeted to his 45.6 million followers on Tuesday, before blasting the nuclear deal his predecessor, Barack Obama, brokered with Tehran in 2015.
“All of the money that president Obama so foolishly gave them went into terrorism and into their ‘pockets.’ The people have little food, big inflation and no human rights.”
As many as 22 people have died in clashes between protesters and security forces since a wave of anti-government protests began on Thursday in the city of Mashhad, and have since spread across the country and to the capital, Tehran.
Speaking to reporters at the UN on Tuesday, US ambassador Nikki Haley said Washington was not planning any unilateral action but called for meetings of the UN Security Council and the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
“This is the precise picture of a long-oppressed people rising up against their dictators. The international community has a role to play in this. The freedoms that are enshrined in the United Nations charter are under attack in Iran,” she said.
The rallies are a rare public display of ire against a political elite that has kept a tight grip on power since the 1979 revolution against the pro-Western Shah.
The threat of US sanctions comes ahead of a congressional deadline Trump faces this month on whether to continue waiving sanctions that were frozen under the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and major world powers.
Last year, Trump declined to certify Iran’s compliance with the deal, but Congress did not act on a provision allowing lawmakers to reimpose the nuclear-related curbs within 60 days. Trump can also impose new sanctions, unrelated to the accord.
Trump moves toward sanctions over Iran protests
Trump moves toward sanctions over Iran protests
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
