Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has said that US accusations that Tehran has a chemical weapons programme were “obscene and dangerous”.

The US allegations are the latest salvo against Iran from the administration of President Donald Trump, who earlier this year pulled out of a landmark 2015 nuclear deal between major powers and Tehran and reimposed crippling unilateral sanctions.

“ US wants to resort to international conventions to make allegations against Iran when it’s made a policy of violating them itself,” Zarif said in a tweet on Friday.

He said that allegations about weapons of mass destruction “by a country that supported Iraq’s use of CW against Iran, then invaded Iraq to allegedly rid it of them is not just obscene, it’s dangerous”.

Iran has accused the US of being the “only member state that has a chemical weapons arsenal and has, until now, not acted on its obligations to destroy it”.

Iran is one of the few countries that has been attacked with chemical weapons since the end of World War I in 1918.

Chemical weapons used by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during its 1980-88 war with Iran killed and wounded tens of thousands of Iranian soldiers and civilians.

Iran has expressed strong opposition ever since to the use or possession of chemical weapons by any country.

Zarif, who is in Italy for a conference, on Friday also expressed his frustration with the European Union’s delay to come up with means of allowing EU trade with Tehran despite US sanctions .