The seized British sailors and marines have confessed to having entered Iranian waters, the semi-official FARS News Agency of Iran said on Saturday.
Britain had said that the sailors captured at gunpoint on Friday were not in Iranian waters and warned that Britain viewed their fate as a ‘fundamental’ issue. The Foreign Office in London said British officials do not know where Iran was holding them.
Blair called the situation ‘very serious’ at a news conference in Berlin and said ‘It is simply not true that they went into Iranian territorial waters.’ Iran, however, maintained that they had illegally entered Iranian waters and termed the act an ‘aggression.’
Britain and the United States said that the sailors were in the Iraqi part of the Shatt al Arab waterway when they were intercepted by the Iranian navy. They had just completed a search of a civilian vessel, they said.
The British ambassador Geoffrey Adams was called in by the Foreign Ministry ‘to protest the illegal entry’, reported the Iranian state television. Britain disputed this claim and said the ‘meeting was called at the ambassador’s request.’ Britain, on its part, had summoned the Iranian ambassador to the Foreign Office for what were described as ‘brisk but polite’ talks.
Lord Triesman, a Foreign Office undersecretary who had held talks with Iran’s ambassador on Saturday, said ‘I’ve been very clear throughout that the British forces do not ever intentionally enter into Iranian waters. We believe there’s good strong evidence that they were in Iraqi water at the time. The issue of whether the sailors had strayed into Iranian waters is a technical one and I think it could be resolved as a technical issue.‘
General Ali Reza Afshar of Iran said on Saturday that the seized Britons ‘confessed’ to illegally entering Iranian waters in Tehran where they have been taken for questioning.
The French President Jacques Chirac expressed support for Britain’s position saying ‘It appears clear that these soldiers were not in the Iranian zone at the time.’
Britain’s Northern Ireland Secretary described Tehran’s refusal to return the sailors as a dangerous development.
In a similar incident in 2004 Iran seized three UK patrol boats and eight crew members in the Shatt al Arab waterway close to Iraq border. Iran released the boats and the men, after General Ali Reza Afshar said Iran was satisfied with the men’s statement that they had ‘made a mistake’.
The Shatt al Arab waterway is a river, formed by the confluence of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, and forms the border between Iran and Iraq along its about 200 kilometer long course before discharging into the Persian Gulf. It is 200 to 800 meters wide and has dense marshlands on both the sides.
The European Union, which is celebrating the 50th year of its founding in Berlin, called for immediate release of the captured sailors.
