The British embassy in Tehran announced today that the British diplomat, who Iranian state television reported yesterday, Wednesday, had been arrested in Iran, had left the country in December 2021.
Yesterday, Iranian state television and Iran’s Fars news agency reported that foreign diplomats, including a Briton, had been arrested by the Revolutionary Guards on charges of espionage. Iranian media did not specify when the arrests took place.
Iranian television also broadcast video showing a man it identified as British diplomat Gil Whittaker, who it said was arrested while taking “photographs in a restricted zone where a military exercise was taking place” in the Shahdad desert in the province. Kerman, in southeastern Iran.
“Information about the detention of the second in command of the embassy is very interesting,” British ambassador Simon Sircliffe quipped on Twitter, referring to Gil Whittaker who was his deputy at the British embassy in Tehran.
“He actually left Iran in December (2021) when his mission ended,” the ambassador added.
Before that, Britain’s Foreign Office had also dismissed as “completely false” reports of the arrest of one of its diplomats in Iran.
According to Fars, after his arrest, the British diplomat was “expelled from the country”. However, according to Iranian television, he was simply expelled from “the zone” in which he was arrested.
The Fars news agency also reported that “diplomats of foreign embassies who were arrested were carrying out espionage in Iran”.
Fars and Iranian television did not specify the nationalities of the other diplomats they said had been arrested or how many there were.
Iranian state television also showed images of another detainee, whom it identified as Maciej Walczak, head of the microbiology department at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland. “This university is linked to the Zionist regime,” she added, referring to Israel.
However, according to Marcin Czysniewski, the representative of this university in Poland, “this is an old case”. Maciej Valczak was arrested in Iran “in September,” the spokesman added, without elaborating.
Maciej Walczak is a Polish research biologist specializing in microorganisms that live in different environments, according to his description on the university’s website.
According to Iranian state television, Macieh Valchak “went to the Shahdad desert as a tourist while missile tests were taking place there. He was taking rock samples.”
Shahdad is mostly visited by tourists.
SOURCE: APE-ME
Source: Capital
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