Mehman-Parast referred to the blocking of Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi’s flight by Hungary’s government. Salehi was to attend the 16th annual meeting of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
Mehman-Parast said, “The US officials were to receive notifications at the conference over their failure to abide by their commitments on elimination of chemical weapons since their deadline has past.
“Salehi’s presence in the conference could have been decisive and the US officials’ pressures hindered his trip,” Mehman-Parast said.
Hungarian officials said Salehi’s plane could not enter Hungarian airspace because it was one of the Iran Air planes banned from EU airspace for safety reasons.
The United States announced its plans to eliminate all its chemical weapons in the late 1960s, more than four decades ago. But it has never met any of its own deadlines let alone those later set in the chemical weapons treaty. For example, at one storage site in Kentucky, the local community has refused to allow the chemicals to be moved out to an incineration site and it has also banned the construction of incinerators at the storage site.
