Lhe Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s ideological army, have arrested foreign diplomats accused of “espionage”, the Iranian news agency Fars and state television reported on Wednesday. “The Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence service has identified and arrested diplomats from foreign embassies who were spying in Iran,” Fars news agency reported.
The agency said one of them, a Briton, was then “expelled from the country after he presented his apologies”. But state television claimed the British diplomat, billed as Giles Whitaker, had been expelled from “the area” where the diplomats were arrested in central Iran. In London, the Foreign Office denied the arrest of one of its diplomats in Iran. “The press reports about the arrest of a diplomat are completely false,” a spokesperson said.
It was not immediately known the nationality of the other diplomats arrested, their number and the date of their arrest. State television accused the British diplomat of having “engaged in intelligence operations” in “areas where” military maneuvers were taking place with missile tests. A television video shows footage of a man, billed as Giles Whitaker, talking in a room.
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According to television, the British diplomat “is among the people who went to the Shahdad desert […] as tourists. As the pictures show, this person was taking pictures […] in a prohibited area, where a military exercise was taking place at the same time”. Giles Whitaker took up his post as deputy to the British ambassador to Tehran in 2018. According to the Fars agency, those arrested notably took rock samples in the desert for “espionage” purposes.
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The television has implicated Israel, a sworn enemy of Iran, in these cases. “Apparently, Israel wants to open a file on the possible military dimension of Iran’s nuclear program, using third-country nationals who are linked to Western embassies. Israel accuses Iran of seeking to acquire atomic weapons, which this country denies.
State television also showed images of another arrested man, presented as “Maciej Walczak, head of the microbiology department at Nicolas-Copernicus University in Poland”. “This university is linked to the Zionist regime,” she said in reference to Israel. Maciej Walczak, whose nationality is not specified, “entered Iran with three other people within the framework of scientific exchanges, but he went to the desert region of Shahdad as a tourist when missile tests,” said the same source. He “took rock samples there”.
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Another arrested man is presented by television as “Ronald, the husband of the cultural adviser of the Austrian embassy”. He is accused of having “taken rock samples” from a village in the Damghan region east of Tehran and of having “filmed a military zone in Tehran”.
Concessions expected from the West
Last March, two Iranian-Britons, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori, sentenced to prison on charges they have always denied, were released. “In parallel” with this release, London announced that it had settled an old debt of 394 million pounds (470 million euros) with Tehran, without establishing a link between the two cases.
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More than a dozen Westerners, mostly dual nationals, are currently detained in Iran, which is suspected of wanting to cash them in exchange for concessions from the West. Negotiations have been underway for more than a year between Tehran and the West to try to revive the international agreement on the Iranian nuclear program concluded in Vienna in 2015, with the key for the Islamic Republic a lifting of sanctions.
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The unilateral withdrawal of the United States from the agreement in 2018 and the reimposition of severe economic sanctions had prompted Iran to renege on its own commitments. These discussions have been blocked since March.