UK Denies Iran’s Claim To Have Arrested Deputy Envoy, Additional Diplomats, Scientists for Spying

The British Foreign Office has denied Iranian claims that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) had arrested Giles Whitaker, the deputy head of mission at the British Embassy in Tehran, along with several other diplomats and academics for “spying” and collecting soil samples from a prohibited area during a missile exercise. The alleged arrests were reported by the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency on Wednesday. The IRGC released a video purporting to show the detainees’ “spying” activities. “The British deputy ambassador had gone to Shahdad Desert (in central Iran) with his family as a tourist,” the video claims, “but as the recorded images show, this person was collecting soil samples in this area.” A UK Foreign Office spokesperson called Iran’s claim to have detained a British diplomat “completely false.” Iran also named a Polish scientist, Maciej Walczak, as one of the detained “spies.” Walczak visited Iran “under the guise of scientific exchanges,” but instead, went to the Shahdad region in Kerman Province, where the IRGC was holding a missile test, the Iranian report claimed. Walczak and others with him then allegedly collected samples of soil, water, rock, salt, and mud from the region near the testing area. A third alleged arrestee identified in the report is the spouse of a cultural adviser at the Austrian Embassy, who was said to have collected soil samples from the area of Damghan, a city about 50 miles south of the Caspian Sea in northern Iran’s Semnan Province.