A raft of Western economic sanctions on Iran over its controversial nuclear program are increasingly stifling the lives of ordinary Iranians, hit by rising inflation and growing isolation.

EU and U.S. banking sanctions put in place 18 months ago, and reinforced on Monday, have fuelled Iran's runaway inflation and triggered a collapse in the value of the rial, with implications for the country's residents and diaspora.

Seventeen people have died after a storm capsized a passenger boat off of Iran's southern coast, the official IRNA news agency reported on Sunday.

The boat sank Saturday evening while sailing between Hormuz Island and the port city of Bandar Abbas on the mainland, the report said. Rescue teams saved five passengers.

Iran said Israel and the United States were behind a car-bomb assassination of one of its nuclear scientists in Tehran on Wednesday, calling it a "terrorist act" in the same vein as previous killings of other Iranian scientists.

"This terrorist act was carried out by agents of the Zionist regime (Israel) and by those who claim to be combatting terrorism (the United States) with the aim of stopping our scientists from serving" Iran, Vice President Mohammed Reza Rahimi told state television.

The U.S. navy's rescue of 13 Iranians from pirates who had hijacked their fishing vessel was a "welcome" humanitarian act, foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said on Saturday.

"We consider the actions of the U.S. forces in saving the lives of the Iranian seamen to be a humanitarian and positive act and we welcome such behavior," Mehmanparast told Iran's Arabic-language broadcaster Al-Alam.

China said Wednesday it opposed "unilateral" sanctions against Iran, after U.S. President Barack Obama signed into law new measures targeting the Islamic republic's central bank.

Washington's move came after the United States, Britain and Canada said in November they were slapping additional sanctions on Iran, citing evidence that Tehran is pursuing nuclear weapons.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on Tuesday that Iran was continuing to develop nuclear weapons and called for stronger sanctions against Tehran.

"Iran is pursuing the development of its nuclear arms, I have no doubt about it," he told French television I-Tele. "The last report by the International Atomic Energy Agency is quite explicit on this point."

Iran has no long-range missiles, a Russian defense official said Tuesday in Moscow's first response to a series of tests conducted by Tehran near the vital Strait of Hormuz oil supply route.

"Iran does not have the technology to create intermediate or long-range inter-continental ballistic missiles," defense ministry spokesman Vadim Koval told the Interfax news agency.

An Iraqi Shiite militia group behind the kidnap of a British consultant and his four bodyguards, and blamed for the killing of U.S. troops, said on Monday it would join the political process.

Qais al-Khazali, leader of Asaib Ahel al-Haq or League of the Righteous, said the departure of American forces a week ago meant violent "resistance" was no longer required.

Tehran's envoy to the U.N. atomic agency said Thursday he would meet the watchdog's chief nuclear inspector in Vienna in the first week of January to arrange a visit to Iran as soon as possible.

"As soon as the holidays are over we will sit down with Mr. (Herman) Nackaerts and arrange the visit," Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Tehran's envoy to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told Agence France Presse.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman has said Washington has evidence that Tehran and its Lebanese ally Hizbullah are bolstering Syria’s Assad regime.

Speaking in Amman, Feltman told reporters that Syrian President Bashar Assad is pegging his ruling Alawite minority against other sects and implementing his "own prophesy, which is moving Syria into more chaos and a civil war."