Iran raises the hostage stakes

Hardliners demand British captives be used to teach West a lesson

Tony Allen-Mills in New York, Marie Colvin and Michael Smith | TheTimesOnline.co.uk

THE 15 British sailors and Royal Marines captured by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in a waterway separating Iran and Iraq were yesterday trapped in an outbreak of aggressive political brinkmanship that may mark a bleak turning point in the West’s relations with Tehran.

Officials in London and Washington remained publicly optimistic that Iran would respond to international pressure and free them within days, despite claims by a senior military official in Tehran that the captives had “confessed” to illegally entering Iranian territorial waters on Friday in a pair of rigid inflatable boats known as RIBs.

Yet there were ominous signs from Tehran that hardline religious elements were seeking to turn the incident into a major confrontation with the West. Several conservative student groups called on the Iranian government not to release the service personnel until five Iranians detained by US forces in Iraq earlier this year were released.

The groups also called for the cancellation of United Nations sanctions imposed on Iran after a unanimous security council vote in New York last night. The new sanctions were in response to Tehran’s refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment programme, which may be used to build nuclear weapons.

Iran shrugged off the vote and vowed to pursue its nuclear goals. “Suspension is neither an option nor a solution,” said Manouchehr Mottaki, the foreign minister. “I can assure you that pressure and intimidation will not change Iranian policy.”

There was also a demonstration by 500 student radicals gathered on the Iranian shore of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, where the Britons were seized shortly after they had completed a routine antismuggling inspection of a dhow laden with vehicles. In a sinister echo of the US embassy hostage crisis in Tehran in 1979, the students chanted “Death to Britain” and “Death to America”.

The British captives were said by one Iranian source to have been moved yesterday into the notorious dungeons of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) at the Ghasre Firouzeh military complex in Tehran.

Their seizure followed a series of embarrassing military setbacks for the IRGC, founded by the late Ayatollah Khomeini after the Iranian revolution of 1979, and which now answers directly to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme religious leader.

There was widespread speculation that the seizure may have been a reprisal for the arrest by US troops of five members of the IRGC’s elite al-Quds Brigade, which has been accused by the Pentagon of arming and assisting Shi’ite militias in Iraq. The IRGC has also been stung by a series of apparent defections of high-ranking officers.

Intelligence sources in the region had warned that the IRGC may have been planning retaliation for what it claimed was a western plot to destabilise Tehran’s military command.

The Sunday Times last week quoted Reza Falker, a writer for the Revolutionary Guards’ weekly newspaper, as saying: “We’ve got the ability to capture a nice bunch of blue-eyed blond-haired officers and feed them to our fighting cocks.”

The Sunday Times article also quoted a Jordanian intelligence officer as saying: “In Iraq, the Quds force can easily get hold of American and British officers.”

The Shatt al-Arab waterway was an obvious target for a premeditated kidnap. Its waters have been disputed for centuries and were a prime cause of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. It is still littered with the wrecks of bombed-out ships.

“The problem is that nobody knows where the border is,” said Lawrence Potter, a professor of international affairs at Columbia University, New York. “The British might have thought they were on their side, the Iranians might have thought they were on their side.”

British officials have long been aware of the area’s potential navigational hazards. In June 2004 eight sailors and marine commandos were seized in a similar incident when Tehran accused them of straying into Iranian waters. On that occasion the men were blindfolded and paraded on Iranian television, then released three days later. Tehran never returned their boats.

The British personnel seized on Friday were in Iraqi waters, according to their commanding officer, Commodore Nick Lambert of the frigate HMS Cornwall, who said he had “absolutely no doubt” about their position.

After their uneventful inspection of the dhow, the Britons were on their way out of the area when they were surrounded by six larger vessels armed with heavy machineguns. The crews of the RIBs had rifles and pistols.

A Royal Navy helicopter spotted the Iranian vessels towing the inflatables towards a military base on the Iranian shore. The helicopter made radio contact with the Iranians, and was told there had been no fighting and that nobody was hurt.

US military officials publicly supported Britain’s claim that the seized sailors and marines were inside Iraqi waters, but sources in Washington privately acknowledged it was a difficult case to prove. The Iraqi military commander in nominal charge of territorial waters cast further doubt on the British claim.

“We were informed by Iraqi fishermen . . . that there were British gunboats in an area that is out of Iraqi control,” said Brigadier-General Hakim Jassim in Basra. “We don’t know why they were there.” Yet the main concern in both London and Washington was that legal niceties would rapidly become irrelevant if the incident spirals into a stage-managed confrontation over Iran’s nuclear weapons programme and its alleged subversion in Iraq.

Yesterday’s UN resolution presents Tehran with a tougher sanctions regime, and several US analysts speculated that the Iranians may feel they have nothing to lose by precipitating a diplomatic crisis that has conveniently distracted popular attention from recent setbacks to the country’s nuclear programme, a source of intense national pride.

A Russian decision to suspend supplies of nuclear fuel to the Bushehr reactor in southern Iran had shaken confidence in the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But the Shatt al-Arab incident has “helpfully changed the subject”, said one Iranian opposition source.

The Tehran foreign ministry’s spokesman, Mohammad Ali-Hosseini, yesterday accused Britain of “illegal and interventionist” entry into Iranian waters. Kate Smith, the British chargé d’affaires in Tehran, was summoned to the Iranian foreign ministry on Friday to receive a formal protest. Geoffrey Adams, Britain’s ambassador to Iran, had been out of the country and was returning this weekend.

Most worrying for London were recent belligerent remarks by Khamenei, who was said by an Iranian source yesterday to have personally approved the order to abduct the Britons.

The fact that the IRGC has custody of the captives will further complicate efforts to find a diplomatic solution. The force, considered the elite of Iran, operates independently of Ahmadinejad’s government.

Sources in Tehran said the British prisoners were almost certain to be suffering similar conditions to those endured by the eight captives held in 2004. They were subjected to mock executions and told they would be put on trial as spies. If Tehran concludes this time that its status in the Middle East will be enhanced by a show trial of British “aggressors”, this crisis could last for months.