Iranian provocation

The Iranian government says the captured British sailors have "confessed" to entering Iranian territorial waters:

The Iranian Foreign Minister accused a group of captured British servicemen last night of having committed an act of “aggression”, only hours after Tony Blair appealed for their release.

“The charge against them is their illegal entrance into Iranian territorial waters,” Manouchehr Mottaki, the Foreign Minister, told a press conference in New York.

In a telephone conversation with Mr Mottaki last night Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, “made extremely clear our view that our personnel were operating in Iraqi waters, called for their immediate return, and asked for immediate consular access to them”, a spokesman said.

But Mr Mottaki told the conference that Iran had already provided British officials with details, including GPS coordinates, of the servicemen’s arrest. The British Ambassador to Tehran was summoned to the Foreign Ministry to explain why 15 service personnel in two inflatable boats had strayed into Iranian territorial waters.

[...]

So far the Iranians have refused to give any details about their fate, other than to say that they are being well treated. General Ali Reza Afshar, Iran’s armed forces spokesman, said that they had been taken to Tehran for questioning and that they had “confessed” to an “aggression into the Islamic Republic of Iran’s waters”.

Diplomats involved in the case believe that the British servicemen were ambushed by a naval unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards with the intention of putting pressure on Britain ahead of the key UN Security Council vote to impose sanctions on Tehran for its nuclear programme. If that was the motive, it failed. On Saturday, the day after the abduction, the council voted unanimously to impose sanctions on Iran, banning the export of weapons and freezing the assets of 28 individuals and companies involved in the country’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.

It's certainly possible that the British sailors had strayed into Iranian waters, but the Iranian response definitely looks like a test of how Britain and its allies will react. Not unlike 1979.

Damian P.

Posted by damian at March 26, 2007 07:22 AM