Golnar Motevalli and Patrick Sykes, Bloomberg News

LONDON/ISTANBUL

EnergiesNet.com 07 14 2022

Iran accused several Europeans including the former British deputy ambassador of spying on military sites, escalating a confrontation with the West over the country’s nuclear program.

State TV broadcast footage that it said showed Giles Whitaker taking soil samples in the Shahdad desert in Kerman, close to where the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps conducted missile exercises.

The British ambassador to Iran, Simon Shercliff, said in a tweet that Whitaker had left the country in December when his posting ended. The state-run Press TV, which is controlled by Tehran’s hardline political establishment, said the IRGC also detained the spouse of the Austrian embassy’s cultural attache and a Polish university professor.

In an email, Austria’s Foreign Ministry denied any of its staff or their relatives in Tehran had been detained. The Polish Foreign Ministry declined to comment. 

The reports come as efforts to revive the 2015 nuclear deal flounder. The latest talks, which took place in Qatar last week, made little progress, according to the European Union and the US, which accused Iran of making extraneous demands. 

US, Tehran Bicker Over Stalled Nuclear Talks: Iran Snapshot (1)

US President Joe Biden has sought for more than a year to return to the nuclear agreement, which placed strict caps on Iran’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief, including on oil. His predecessor, Donald Trump, withdrew from the accord in 2018, and introduced a slew of new sanctions. Iran responded by accelerating its atomic work. 

Iran has a history of detaining foreign and dual nationals on ill-defined national security charges and rights groups have likened the practice to hostage-taking designed to extract concessions from Western governments. 

According to Press TV, all of the European nationals named are accused of traveling to restricted military sites in Kerman and Semnan provinces in Iran and taking soil and rock samples. The Polish academic, named as Maciej Walczak of Copernicus University, is also accused of taking water, salt and mud samples.

In March, a British-Iranian aid worker was released after six years in detention in Iran after the UK agreed to pay back a historic debt of almost 400 million pounds ($478 million) to Tehran. Four Iranian-Americans were released from jail when the original nuclear agreement came into effect.  

Last week, Belgium said one of its nationals, an employee of the Norwegian Refugee Council called Olivier Vandecasteele, was being detained by Iran. According to the BBC, he’s been in isolation in jail for the past five months and is also accused of spying. Belgium is currently holding an Iranian official who was sentenced to 20 years in prison last year, accused of plotting a bomb attack in France. 

bloomberg.com 07 13 2022