Tehran - Iran Wednesday harshly condemned a British court's decision to remove the People's Mujahedin, widely known as MKO, from the terrorist list.

The Appeal Court had earlier Wednesday ordered the British government to remove the MKO from the terrorist list.

"This is a political sentence without any legal basis and reflecting Britain's double-standard approach towards terrorism," Foreign Ministry Spokesman Mohammad-Ali Hosseini said in a press statement.

"The terrorist acts by this group against officials and people of Iran are widely known and the British (court) decision just leads to promotion of terrorism and violence," the spokesman added in the statement.

Iran accuses the MKO of having been involved in several assassinations of high-ranking Iranian officials, including Iran's president and prime minister in 1980.

After the group was expelled from France in the 1980s, former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein allocated a military base to the MKO near the border with Iran.

Before the collapse of Saddam, the MKO several times infiltrated Iranian territory, leading to clashes with Iranian forces and casualties on both sides.

Despite the British court's decision, the MKO is still on the terrorist list of the European Union and even Iran's political arch- foe, the United States. (dpa)