Washington: Senior US lawmakers have slammed Iran for the continuing standoff over the British sailors and urged the international community to pressurise Tehran in a number of ways including on the economic front.

Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Senator Joseph Biden said, "I think you continue to ratchet up, get the entire world to ratchet up further the pressure on Iran...

"But I think quietly you have to be preparing to be able to deal with Iranian oil and be prepared to take the kind of action that would cut off their importation of refined oil and affect their export of crude oil.

"You can hit them very, very badly. But I don't think you talk about that publicly. Were I president, I wouldn't be talking about that. I'd be planning that while I was moving on every front diplomatically," Biden told Fox News yesterday.

Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell argued that this is the kind of behaviour one would expect from a regime that denies that the Holocaust occurred and would like to see Israel annihilated.

"The Iranians, by their own behavior, have done something that's been pretty challenging for everybody else, which is to unify virtually the entire world against them.

"Most of the Sunni Arab countries who are generally friendly with us, like the Egyptians, the Saudis, the Jordanians, are all appalled by Iran. The Iranians' own behaviour has made it more possible for us to get the kind of international cooperation that we need in order to have sanctions that actually bite," McConnell said.