Sailors confessed, claims Tehran
The confrontation over Iran’s seizure of 15 British sailors escalated today with Tehran announcing the captured seamen admitted to straying into Iranian territorial waters.
Iran’s military interrogated the 15 detained British soldiers after moving them to the capital and said they had confessed to illegally entering the country’s waters in what Tehran described as a “blatant aggression”.
Iran’s tough comments came as the UN Security Council was meeting to consider new sanctions on Tehran for its refusal to meet UN demands and halt uranium enrichment.
The West fears Tehran’s nuclear program is used for arms making, a claim Iran denies. European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana said the seizure of the seamen must not derail the push for further UN sanctions on Iran.
“It would be a tremendous mistake if these two things were mixed,” Solana said. The EU is doing its “utmost in co-operation with the British authorities” to free the Britons, he said.
The sailors had just searched a merchant ship on Friday morning when they and their two inflatable boats were intercepted by Iranian vessels near the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway, US and British officials said. The Iranians surrounded them and escorted them away at gunpoint.
Britain immediately demanded the return of the eight Royal Navy sailors and seven Royal Marines – at least one of who was a woman – and denied they had strayed into Iranian waters while searching for smugglers off Iraq’s coast.
Today Iran’s top military official, Gen. Ali Reza Afshar, said the seized soldiers, who were taken to Tehran for questioning, “confessed to illegal entry” and an “aggression into the Islamic Republic of Iran’s waters”. Afshar did not say what would happen to the sailors.
British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett and the UK's Ministry of Defence said the troops were in Iraqi waters at the time they were picked up.
Earlier this week, a senior British military official said Iran was paying local militia in southern Iraq to launch attacks on British forces serving in the region.
Yesterday’s incident was not the first time Iran seized British troops in the same waterway. In June 2004, six British marines and two sailors were captured, then paraded blindfolded on Iranian television. They admitted they had entered Iranian waters illegally but were released unharmed after three days.
Since that incident, Iran’s hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power. Iranian hard-liners have already called for the 15 Britons to be held until Iran wins political concessions from the West.
Some 500 Iranian students gathered on the shore near where the soldiers were captured, shouting “Death to Britain” and “Death to America”, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.
Several conservative student groups urged the Iranian government not to release the sailors until five Iranians detained by US forces in Iraq earlier this year are freed and UN’s new sanctions against Iran are cancelled.
With tensions running high, the US has bolstered its naval forces in the Persian Gulf in a show of strength directed at Iran. There is concern that with so much military hardware in the Gulf, a small incident like Friday’s could escalate dangerously.
Afshar, the Iranian officer, warned the US would not be able to control the consequences if it attacks Iran.
“The US and its allies know that if they make any mistake in their calculations … they will not be able to control the dimensions and limit the duration of a war,” Afshar said.
His comments seemed to echo that of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, who earlier this week warned that Western countries “must know that the Iranian nation and authorities will use all their capacities to strike enemies that attack”.
The seizure of the Britons took place in an area where boundaries between Iraqi and Iranian waters have long been disputed. A 1975 treaty set the centre of the Shatt al-Arab – 125-mile-long channel known in Iran as the Arvand River – as the border.
But Saddam Hussein cancelled the 1975 treaty five years later and invaded Iran, triggering an eight-year war. Virtually all of Iraq’s oil is exported through an oil terminal near the mouth of the channel.
The seized sailors, from the British frigate HMS Cornwall, are part of a task force that maintains security in Iraqi waters under authority of the UN Security Council. Cornwall’s commander, Commodore Nick Lambert, said he hoped the detention was a “simple mistake” stemming from the unclear border.
Iraq’s military commander of the country’s territorial waters, Brig. Gen. Hakim Jassim, said that Iraqi fishermen had reported that the British boats were “in an area that is out of Iraqi control”.
