Students with “Death to America” written on their hands take part in a demonstration outside the former US embassy in Tehran yesterday.

AFP
Tehran
Chanting “Death to America” and burning the US flag, Iranian protesters yesterday marked the anniversary of the US embassy seizure with a show of anti-Washington fervour despite the nuclear deal.
The protest by thousands of Iranians follows the landmark nuclear accord sealed on July 14 by Tehran and world powers led by the United States.
The 1979 storming of the embassy in Tehran by students, months after the Islamic revolution, led to a 444-day hostage crisis and a break in diplomatic relations that continues to this day.
Demonstrators gathered outside the former embassy and across Iran for the “National Day of the Fight Against Global Arrogance”—a term often used by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Protesters held placards with slogans including “Down with USA” and “Down with Israel”.
Prosecutor General Ebrahim Raisi gave a fiery speech attacking US “atrocities” ranging from slavery and the treatment of Native Americans to phone tapping and “the killing of 300,000 Iraqis”.
“A day will come when they will have to answer in court for their atrocities,” he said.
On Monday, a majority of Iranian legislators said the Islamic Republic would not drop the “Death to America” slogan despite the nuclear deal.
“The martyr-nurturing nation of Iran is not at all prepared to abandon the slogan of ‘Death to America’ under the pretext of a nuclear agreement,” they said.
The legislators said the slogan, chanted at Friday prayers in mosques and at protests, had “turned into the symbol of the Islamic Republic and all struggling nations”.
Khamenei has endorsed the nuclear deal, which curbs Iran’s atomic drive in return for a lifting of sanctions, but has repeatedly warned against US “infiltration” of the values of Iranian society.
“Iran has not and will not have direct or indirect co-operation with the United States,” the official Irna news agency yesterday cited Ali Akbar Velayati, Khamenei’s adviser on international affairs, as saying.
Velayati, meeting Syria’s deputy foreign minister, Faisal Muqdad, also said Tehran will accept no solution to the Syrian crisis “unless it has been approved” by Damascus, Irna said.
In what appeared to be a warning to opponents, President Hassan Rouhani yesterday criticised recent arrests carried out in the name of the fight against “infiltration”.
“The term ‘infiltration’ must not be bandied about,” Rouhani told ministers.
“The supreme leader belongs to all trends, to all of the people—he does not belong to one group or a particular trend,” he added.
Iran has arrested a Lebanese-American suspected of links to the US intelligence community, state television reported on Tuesday, although an official in Washington said he was a US resident, not a citizen.
It was unclear when or where the suspect had been arrested, but the report identified him as Nezar Zaka and said he was suspected of “multiple close ties to the US military and intelligence communities”.
The broadcaster aired photographs of what it said was Zaka in military uniform on a US base.