Sanctions force Iran’s Mahan Air to cancel Paris flights

Iran’s Mahan Air has been forced to cancel its Paris flights over “sanctions,” its customer services team has said, weeks after Germany banned the airline.

“We have been told that (flights to France) have been canceled… as of the first of April,” an operator at the airline’s office in Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport told AFP.

The Paris schedule will be scrapped “because of sanctions” by the French, the source said by phone without elaborating.

Two of the airline’s French customers in Iran were notified by email that their flights booked for next month were canceled.

Mahan, the Islamic republic’s second-largest airline after Iran Air, flies up to four services a week between Tehran and Paris.

Mahan Air was blacklisted by the US in 2011, as Washington said the carrier was providing technical and material support to the Quds Force, an elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Germany imposed a ban on Mahan in January, which the foreign ministry said was necessary to protect Berlin’s “foreign and security policy interests.”

That decision came amid broader sanctions adopted by the European Union against Tehran over attacks on opponents in the bloc.

Iran has denied any involvement in the alleged plots and described Germany’s move as “hasty and unjustifiable.”