Former Iranian-owned Boeing plane returned to US

By Diyar Guldogan

WASHINGTON (AA) - The US seized a Boeing 747 cargo plane that a sanctioned Iranian company sold to a Venezuelan firm, the Department of Justice said Monday.

The plane, previously owned by Tehran-based Mahan Air, arrived in the state of Florida, it said in a statement.

"The seized American-built aircraft was transferred by a sanctioned Iranian airline in a transaction that violated U.S. export control laws and directly benefited the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is a designated terrorist organization," Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division was quoted as saying in the statement.

The Justice Department is committed to ensuring that the full force of US laws denies “hostile state actors the means to engage in malign activities that threaten our national security," he added.

Matthew S. Axelrod, Assistant Secretary of Export Enforcement at the US Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security, said Mahan Air, which is "known to ferry weapons and fighters for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and (the Lebanese group) Hezbollah, violated our export restrictions by selling this airplane" to a Venezuelan cargo airline.

According to the statement, the plane was previously detained by Argentina in 2022 after the US District Court for the District of Columbia issued a seizure warrant for the aircraft.