EU airlines cut flights to Iran

LONDON: Two European airlines said they were halting services to Iran, a sign of the crumbling purchasing power of Iranians as their economy buckles under the weight of Western sanctions.

Air France-KLM will suspend its Amsterdam-Tehran service starting in April, a spokesman for the carrier said this weekend.

It currently flies to Iran four times a week.

Austrian Airlines, a unit of Germany’s Deutsche Lufthansa , is also cancelling its services to Iran – due to a lack of demand, a spokesman said.

The carrier’s last flight from Vienna to Tehran took off yesterday.

It used to fly to Tehran four times a week, but that was reduced to three in November.

The Iranian rial has lost about two-thirds of its value against the US dollar in the last year, following US sanctions on its central bank and an EU embargo of Iranian oil, levied over Iran’s disputed nuclear programme.

That depreciation has made imported goods and foreign plane tickets far more expensive for Iranians.

A spokesman for Lufthansa said the German carrier was continuing to fly to Tehran five times a week. Italian airline Alitalia also flies to Iran, according to its website.

The US and its European allies fear Iran is trying to build a bomb under the cover of a civilian nuclear programme.

Iran says its programme is purely peaceful.

The sanctions against Iran’s energy and banking sectors have made it more difficult for the Iranian government to earn foreign currency, raising concern that the central bank will not be able to defend the rial and depressing its value.

Airlines already had to think twice over whether to maintain services to the country since Iran said in 2011 that it had stopped providing fuel to European aircraft in retaliation for their refusal to fuel Iranian planes.

Austrian Airlines suspended its service to Tehran for more than two months last year because it could not be sure of getting its planes refuelled there. – Reuters