First you had the three Americans arrested by Iran after inadvertantly crossing into it's territory in a remote hiking area, now you have the arrest of five British sailors who inadvertantly sailed into Iranian waters.
-- Iran confirmed the arrest Tuesday of five British sailors who were on a racing yacht, with one official saying they could be dealt with " severely", the country's semi-official Fars News Agency reported.
"We shall deal severely with the five arrested UK citizens, if it is proven that they had ill intentions," Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaie, the president's head of staff said according to the news agency.
Their vessel, a racing yacht called the Kingdom of Bahrain, was on its way from Bahrain to Dubai for a race when it was stopped by Iranian navy ships on November 25, the British Foreign Office confirmed.
The boat "may have strayed inadvertently into Iranian waters" when it was intercepted, a Foreign Office statement said.
http://www.cnn.com/...
These latest British crew members are not military personnel, but competitive sailors, on their way to take part in a yacht race.
They were stopped not in the sensitive disputed region between Iraq and Iran, but lower down in the Persian Gulf.
And this time there is no disagreement about what may have happened - everyone seems to agree that they may have mistakenly strayed into Iranian waters.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/...
Britain's Foreign Sec. had this to say, wanting to tamp down the incident.
"There is certainly no confrontation or argument. [...] We understand that the Iranian government are investigating the incident, which is perfectly reasonable, and then we would look forward to it being promptly sorted out," Miliband said.
He sought to dampen any comparison with March 2007, when 15 British Navy personnel from the HMS Cornwall were detained by Iran, which accused them of straying into Iranian waters. The sailors were paraded in front of television cameras before being released two weeks later as a "gift" to Britain from Mr. Ahmadinejad. Similarly, in July, three Americans were detained after straying into Iran while hiking in Iraq. They have been charged with espionage, which can carry a death sentence in Iran.
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The five Britons detained last week may have drifted into Iranian waters after having some difficulty with the propeller of their craft, reports The Times of London. But the newspaper reports the yacht, owned by Sail Bahrain, was boarded twice. The first time, Iranians confiscated the yacht's navigation computers before releasing the crew. At this point, the yacht's engine reportedly broke down. Before the crew could arrange to be towed to Dubai, the Iranians boarded the yacht a second time and detained the crew, according to the paper.
Although the precise sequence of events remains unclear, it appears that the original decision by the Iranians to let the yacht continue on its passage to Dubai may have been overruled after its diplomatic value to Iran had been assessed.
http://www.csmonitor.com/...
hmmm, their diplomatic value? What could their diplomatic value be? Releasing them amidst fanfare and self proclaimed accolades that the Iranian gov't is filled with noblemen? Or perhaps, firing up their domestic base by stoking the flames of xenophobia?
Hard-line Iranian students will gather outside the British embassy in Tehran on Wednesday to protest "the Britons' illegal entry" into Iranian waters, the ISNA news agency reported.
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Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called Britain "the most treacherous" of Iran's enemies after Prime Minister Gordon Brown condemned Tehran's violent suppression of protests that followed the disputed June presidential election.
http://www.reuters.com/...
videe of incident:
Well, let's just hope these Brits are released swiftly, unlike the three Americans who have been held for months so far.
Either Tehran can decide to play the incident down and let the sailors go, or it could turn this into a full blown diplomatic crisis.
moon