TEHRAN: Iran on Thursday slammed a decision by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to suspend Syria's membership, calling the step against its key ally "unfair and unjust."
"Syria should have been invited to the summit to defend itself," Iran's foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi told the official IRNA news agency in the holy Muslim city of Mecca.
Earlier Thursday, at the end of an emergency meeting in Mecca, the OIC announced it had suspended Syria's membership of the 57-nation body, and expressed "deep concern at the massacres and inhuman acts suffered by the Syrian people."
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Salehi had attended the two-day OIC summit but were unable to stop the decision.
Ahmadinejad was quoted by state television on arrival in Tehran as saying that the OIC's decision "was a political action" that Iran had resisted.
"At the summit, the Islamic Republic of Iran's positions on the issues at hand were accurately explained," he said. (AFP)