Iran will take serious measures against five British yachtsmen detained in the Gulf if it proves they had “evil intentions,” a close aide to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on yesterday.
Relations between Britain and Iran and have been dogged by tension in recent years over a range of issues, from Tehran’s nuclear program to Iranian allegations of British involvement in post-election violence in June this year.
“The judiciary will decide about the five ... naturally our measures will be hard and serious if we find out they had evil intentions,” Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaie, the president’s chief of staff, told the Fars news agency.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Britain said the five men were civilians and played down parallels with a 2007 incident when Iran seized eight British Royal Navy sailors and seven marines off its coast.
“There is certainly no confrontation or argument. As far as we are aware these people are being well treated, which is right, and what we would expect from a country like Iran,” British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said on BBC Radio 4.
Miliband said he was expecting a statement later yesterday from the Iranian Foreign Ministry.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards confirmed yesterday their naval forces had detained five Britons in the Gulf, Fars said.
“Confronting foreign forces and detaining them in the Gulf is the Revolutionary Guards’ duty,” said Ali Reza Tangsiri, a commander of the Guards’ naval forces.
A new US intelligence study says Iran has restructured its naval forces to give an arm of the elite Revolutionary Guards full responsibility for operations in the Gulf.
Miliband said the sailors may have “inadvertently strayed” into Iranian waters. Britain said their yacht was stopped by Iranian naval vessels last Wednesday.
Hardline Iranian students planned gather outside the British embassy in Tehran today to protest “the Britons’ illegal entry” into Iranian waters, the ISNA news agency reported.
Organizers of a race in which the yachtsmen were planning to take part said the vessel had reported problems with a propeller en route from Bahrain to Dubai in the Gulf.
It is not clear what route the boat took from Bahrain, which is just off the coast of Saudi Arabia and Dubai.
Richard Schofield, an expert on international boundaries in the Middle East at King’s College in London, said it was difficult to understand how its crew could have ended up in trouble with Iranian authorities.
“It’s hard to see why, on a regular journey from Bahrain to Dubai, they would have gone through Iranian territorial waters,” he said.
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