Issued on: 07/07/2022 – 01:05
The British government on Wednesday categorically denied Iranian reports that its deputy ambassador to Tehran had been arrested.
“Reports of the arrest of a British diplomat in Iran are completely false,” said a spokesman for the Foreign Office in London, without giving further details.
Fars news agency and state television had reported that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has arrested several foreign diplomats, including British deputy mission chief Giles Whitaker, on charges of ‘espionage’.
“Revolutionary Guards intelligence identified and arrested diplomats from foreign embassies who were spying in Iran,” Fars said, adding that a British diplomat was subsequently expelled from the country.
State television, however, reported that Whitaker was only evicted from “the area” where the diplomats had been arrested in central Iran. State television accused him of “conducting intelligence operations” in military areas.
Video showed footage of a man presented as Whitaker speaking in a room.
A state television journalist said the diplomat was “one of those who went to the Shahdad desert with his family as a tourist,” referring to an area in central Iran.
“As the images show, this person was taking photos… in a restricted area where a military exercise was taking place at the same time,” the broadcaster said.
The developments have coincided with rising tensions between Tehran and world powers over long-stalled attempts to revive a 2015 nuclear deal and a recent rise in confirmed detentions of Western nationals in the country.
The number, nationality and date of arrest of the other detained diplomats was not immediately clear.
Nuclear deadlock, other detentions
The US withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 under then-President Donald Trump, who subsequently re-imposed corrosive sanctions against Tehran, prompting the latter to relinquish many of the nuclear commitments it had made under the accord. .
Iran has been in direct talks with the remaining parties to the deal — and indirect talks with the US — since April 2021 in an effort to restore the deal, but those negotiations have been at an impasse since March.
Qatar hosted indirect talks in Doha last week in an effort to get the Vienna process back on track, but those talks broke down after two days without any breakthrough.
More than a dozen Western nationals are being held in Iran in what activists say is a hostage policy aimed at getting concessions from the West.
Belgium’s parliament on Wednesday approved a controversial prisoner exchange treaty with Iran in a first reading of a text that has yet to undergo a full vote for ratification.
Iran also accused a French couple detained in May while on vacation of alleged “undermining the security” of the country on Wednesday, the judicial authority said.
The French government has condemned their arrest as “unfounded” and demanded their immediate release.
Last month, Amnesty International called on the British government to investigate Iran’s six-year detention of dual citizenship Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, deploring it as “an act of hostage taking”.
She was released in the UK along with another detainee early this year after the UK agreed to pay a long-standing debt to Tehran.
(FRANCE24 with AFP)