Did Iran use airline Mahan Air to ferry cash to the EU and U1 material to a satellite nuclear facility in Northern Syria?

Early 2016:

On Jan. 16, 2016, the same day four American detainees were released, a jumbo jet carrying $400 million in euros, Swiss francs and other currencies landed in Tehran.

That money purportedly was partial payment of an outstanding claim by Iran for U.S. military equipment that was never delivered.

Soon after, $1.3 billion in cash followed.

Late 2015:

Iranian-based Mahan Air has operated a number of flights between cities in Iran and Syria.

The flights don’t leave on a set schedule, and the planes sometimes don’t broadcast their actual destination – or any destination at all

“A few times they have broadcast the Tehran Baghdad route then actually flew on to Damascus,” Ottolenghi said.

In another instance, an aircraft broadcasting the code for a Tehran-Damascus flight landed instead in Latakia, a strategic city in the regime-controlled Syrian coast.

Ottolenghi spotted a flight on September 19th flying under a Tehran-to-Damascus flight number that instead landed in Abadan, a city in an Arabic-speaking section of Iran that is also home to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base

Mahan has been under various forms of US sanctions since 2011 for its involvement in “shipping arms to the Syrian government; ferrying members of Iran’s elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; and providing transport for the Lebanese militia Hezbollah,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

And four years into the Syrian Civil War, Mahan Airlines planes are undertaking odd-houred flights to Syria that don’t follow their broadcast itinerary – a deception that runs counter to accepted international civil aviation practice.

The US considers Mahan to be a criminal operation and with good cause. A state-sponsor of terrorism uses its aircraft to aid one of the most oppressive governments in the world. Mahan itself has benefited from an illicit supply chain that extended into Europe.

The EU, however, takes a different view.

The airline isn’t currently under EU sanctions and actually flies to a few EU cities.

According to its website, and to Ottolenghi’s research, Mahan Air takes passengers to Athens, Dusseldorf, Munich, and Milan.

The enforcement of secondary US sanctions over European business with Iran has long been a sticking point in trans-Atlantic relations.

In 1996, controversy erupted over the the US imposition of sanctions on Iran and Libya, as European countries whose companies were invested in Iran and Libya were concerned about US legal exposure from the recently passed Iran-Libya Sanctions Act.

A brewing trans-Atlantic dispute was only resolved when President Bill Clinton’s administration signed an executive agreement specifically exempting European companies from the law.

Several European countries have actually passed laws prohibiting companies from complying with US sanctions, giving an additional layer of protection to US-sanctioned entities that do business in the EU.

http://www.businessinsider.com/this-iranian-airline-is-one-of-the-assad-regimes-lifelines-2015-10/