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Iran denies UK requests about personnel

British officials do not know where Iran is holding 15 sailors and marines captured in the Persian Gulf, and requests for access to them have been denied, the Foreign Office said yesterday as Tehran again protested what it called their illegal entry into Iranian waters.

The British ambassador to Iran met with senior officials at the Iranian Foreign Ministry and demanded the immediate release of the captured personnel, the Foreign Office said.

Iranian State TV said the ministry summoned Ambassador Geoffrey Adams "to protest the illegal entry of British sailors into Iranian territorial waters." It gave no details about the meeting.

Britain said the meeting had been instigated by its ambassador.

Iran's top military official, General Ali Reza Afshar, said on Saturday the seized Britons were taken to Tehran for questioning and had confessed to what he called an "aggression into the Islamic Republic of Iran's waters." He did not say what would happen to them but said all were being treated well and were in good health.

The Foreign Office said yesterday that British requests for access to the 15 Britons have been denied.

Tehran has described the incident as a "blatant aggression" but Britain has repeatedly insisted the sailors were in Iraqi waters in the Shatt al Arab waterway between Iraq and Iran.

Lord Triesman, a Foreign Office under-secretary who held talks with Iran's ambassador on Saturday, told Sky News the issue of whether the sailors had strayed into Iranian waters was a technical one.

"I've been very clear throughout that the British forces do not ever intentionally enter into Iranian waters," he said. "There's no reason for them to do so, we don't intend to do so and I think people should accept there's good faith in those assertions."

"We believe there's good strong evidence that they were in Iraqi water at the time," Triesman said. "That's a technical issue and I think it could be resolved as a technical issue."

"We don't [know where the military personnel are] and I wish we did but we [want] to know whether they are being moved around inside Iran," he said.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said yesterday that Tehran must understand its action was "unjustified and wrong."

"This is a very serious situation and there is no doubt at all that these people were taken from a boat in Iraqi waters," he told a news conference after a EU summit.

"I hope the Iranian government understands how fundamental an issue this is for us," he said.

The EU also has been pushing hard diplomatically to secure the sailors' release. Germany had its ambassador in Tehran raise the issue with the Iranian government.

British, Israeli and Saudi media reports yesterday suggested that Iran was hoping to trade the captured Britons for Iranian officials it claims have been abducted by the West in recent months.

Ali Askari, former head of an elite unit of the Revolutionary Guard, disappeared in Turkey six weeks ago; several months earlier, six Iranian officials were captured by US forces in Iraq.

The US military said those detained were connected to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard faction that funds and arms insurgents in Iraq.
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