British ambassador to Iran meets two Britons detained on security-related charges

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This article was published 13/02/2025 (296 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — The British ambassador to Iran met with two Britons — a man and a woman — being held in Iran on security-related charges, the official IRNA news agency reported.

The report late Wednesday said Ambassador Hugo Shorter met the two in the southern Iranian city of Kerman and in the presence of officials from the justice department and the governor’s office.

The report neither identifies them nor elaborates on the time or place of their detention, though it calls them “suspects,” suggesting they have not been sentenced and were possibly detained in recent weeks.

IRNA published two images that showed the two sitting opposite the ambassador at a meeting table.

“We are providing consular assistance to two British Nationals detained in Iran and are in contact with the local authorities,” a spokesperson of the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, or FCDO, said in a statement to The Associated Press.

The statement added that the FCDO has long advised against travel to Iran for British and British-Iranian nationals, who face significant risk of detention.

Iran has a history of detaining and releasing western nationals on security charges. The country has long been accused of holding those with Western ties as prisoners to be used as bargaining chips in negotiations with the West. Iran denies those accusations.

In 2022, Iran released British-Iranian aid worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe after more than five years. She had been sentenced to five years in prison after being convicted of plotting to overthrow Iran’s government, a charge that she, her supporters and rights groups denied.