- (AFP) - Iran is to prosecute eight British soldiers detained
for allegedly straying into Iranian territorial waters close to the Iraqi
border, Al-Alam television reported quoting Iranian military sources.
-
- "They are going to be prosecuted for illegally entering
Iranian territorial waters. They were 1,000 metres (yards) inside Iranian
territorial waters," said the Arabic-language satellite channel, a
branch of Iran's state television.
-
- The station said the soldiers, who were detained Monday
and whose three boats were also seized by Iranian Revolutionary Guards,
had already "confessed" to having entered Iranian waters.
-
- "Their last known indication was to be in the Shatt
al-Arab area which is not unusual," said the spokesman.
-
- Earlier a Royal Navy spokesman at the defence ministry
in London called it a "low-level incident", saying the three
small boats appeared to have "strayed into Iranian territory."
-
- "These boats are used for training Iraqi river patrol
service ... what we would call river police," said the spokesman,
who was unable to specify if any Iraqis were on board.
-
- "The waterway runs over a mile (1.6 kilometres)
wide. The border runs pretty much down the middle of it ... Maybe, it was
disputed whose side" of the border the vessels were on, he said.
-
- British armed forces control a large area of southern
Iraq around the city of Basra, and along with Iraqi security forces patrol
parts of the Shatt al-Arab, mostly to combat smugglers and militants seeking
to infiltrate Iraq and join the insurgency against the US-led coalition.
-
- Contacts with Iranian troops along that border area have
generally been described by British sources as cordial, and Monday's incident
is the most serious in the sensitive area since last year's US-led invasion
of Iraq.
-
- The Shatt al-Arab border demarcation has been a constant
source of dispute -- and of conflict during the 1980-1988 war between Iran
and Iraq -- under Saddam Hussein, until a deal was struck for the frontier
to run at the mid-way point.
-
- Ties between Britain and Iran have been strained in recent
months, with the embassy here being targeted by a string of angry demonstrations
sparked by an Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal as well as the entry of coalition
troops into Iraq's holy Shiite cities.
-
- During some of the protests, the embassy was pelted with
stones and hit by home-made bombs.
-
- Britain was also the co-sponsor of a resolution passed
by the International Atomic Energy Agency last Friday that heavily criticised
Iran for failing to fully cooperate with an investigation into its suspect
nuclear programme.
-
-
- Copyright © 2004AFP. All rights reserved. All information
displayed in this section (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected
by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence
you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any
way commercially exploit any of the contents of this section without the
prior written consent of Agence France-Presses.
|
