Tehran  - Iran on Monday summoned the British ambassador to Tehran in protest at a court decision to remove the Iranian rebel group People's Mujahedin, widely known as MKO, from the terrorist list.

During the meeting with Geoffrey Adams, Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Mehdi Safari termed the court decision "politically motivated and unacceptable" for Tehran.

Safari accused Britain of following a double standard on the issue of terrorism and said the court decision was not in accordance with British claims of fighting terrorism.

The British government still considered MKO a terrorist group and promised to forward the Iranian standpoint to London, ISNA quoted Adams as saying.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry last week condemned the British Court of Appeal for ordering 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 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 involvement in the assassinations of several high-ranking Iranian officials, including the 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 ouster of Saddam, the MKO frequently 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 European Union's terrorist list and even on that of Iran's political arch-foe, the United States. (dpa)