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Foreign diplomats, including UK envoy, arrested for spying in Iran: Report


Foreign diplomats, including UK envoy, arrested for 'spying' in Iran: Report

Iran said it was accused of “entering the country to sow chaos and cause social unrest”.

Tehran:

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have arrested several foreign diplomats, including a British, accusing them of “spying”, the Fars news agency and state television said on Wednesday.

“Revolutionary Guard intelligence services have identified and arrested diplomats from foreign embassies who are spying in Iran,” Fars said, adding that a British diplomat later that was expelled from the country.

However, state television reported that the British, identified as Giles Whitaker, had been expelled from the “zone” where the diplomats were arrested in central Iran.

Details including the nationalities of other diplomats, how many were arrested and the date of arrest were not immediately clear.

State television accused the British diplomat of “conducting intelligence operations” in areas where military exercises were conducted. The video shows a man believed to be Whitaker talking in the room.

Whitaker has been deputy head of the delegation to Tehran since 2018.

A journalist for a state TV channel said the diplomat was “among those who had come to the Shahdad desert with his family as a tourist”, referring to an area in central Iran.

“As the pictures show, this person was photographed … in a restricted area where a military exercise was also taking place,” the broadcaster said.

State television said he was “deported from the area after apologizing”, although the Fars agency said “he was expelled from the country after apologizing”.

– The case of Belgium –

The news comes amid tensions as Iran and world powers struggle to agree to return to a 2015 nuclear deal.

It also comes as the Belgian Parliament on Wednesday approved a controversial prisoner exchange treaty with Iran in first reading a text that still has to be sent to a full vote to be ratified.

Belgian Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne on Tuesday told MPs that unless the treaty is passed, “the threat to our Belgian interests and to certain Belgian citizens will increase”.

A Belgian humanitarian aid worker was arrested in Iran on 24 February and has been detained since, Quickenborne told MPs.

MPs and the Belgian man’s family identified him as Olivier Vandecasteele, 41.

Human rights groups and media outlets covering Iran say it appears to be another case of Tehran taking hostages in exchange for Iranians being held in the West.

Some were detained at Evin, in a wing run by the intelligence agency of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Among them is a Swedish scholar also of Iranian nationality, Ahmadreza Djalali, who taught at a university in Brussels. Iran also applied the charge of “spying” to Djalali and sentenced him to death.

Last year, Belgium convicted and jailed an Iranian diplomat for 20 years for plotting to bomb outside Paris in 2018.

– French couple –

Also on Wednesday, Iran accused a French couple detained in May while on holiday with “undermining security” of the country, the judiciary said.

French teachers union official Cecile Kohler and her partner Jacques Paris were arrested in early May while on an Easter holiday tour in the Islamic republic. They were accused by the authorities of trying to stir up labor protests.

Justice agency spokesman Massoud Setayeshi told reporters in Tehran.

Iran said it was accused of “entering the country to sow chaos and cause social unrest”.

The French government condemned their arrest as “baseless” and demanded their immediate release.

Last month, Amnesty International called on the British government to investigate Iran’s six-year detention of dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, denouncing it as “an act of hostage taking.”

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 43, who was first detained in Iran in 2016, returned to the UK in March with Anoosheh Ashoori, a dual national after London agreed to pay a long-term debt for Tehran.

Amnesty has compiled a detailed analysis of the incident, which includes “compelling evidence that Iran’s detention of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was an act of hostage taking”.

(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)



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