BRITAIN/IRAN:British prime minister Tony Blair denounced Iran over the weekend for the "unjustified and wrong" seizure of 15 British sailors and marines, rejecting Tehran's claim that they had entered Iranian waters and warning that the situation had become very serious.
"I hope the Iranian government understands how fundamental an issue this is for us," the British prime minister said at a European summit in Berlin.
"They should not be under any doubt at all about how seriously we regard this act, which was unjustified and wrong."
Mr Blair's comments marked a sharpening of British tone after hopes that the capture of the patrol on Friday would prove to be a misunderstanding were dashed by statements from Iran over the weekend.
A senior military official, Gen Ali Reza Afshar, said on Saturday that the patrol had "confessed" to the incursion and claimed the Britons had been taken to Tehran. Other sources hinted they might be put on trial.
Initially, British military officials and diplomats tried to defuse the situation by stressing the complicated nature of the boundaries between Iraq and Iran on the Shatt al-Arab waterway, where the patrol had been conducting anti-smuggling operations. But Mr Blair's declaration left no room for ambiguity.
"This is a very serious situation . . . It is simply not true that they went into Iranian territorial waters," he said. However, he expressed hope that a resolution could be reached over the next few days, adding "the quicker it is resolved, the easier it will be for all of us".
Britain's ambassador to Tehran, Geoffrey Adams, yesterday met Iranian foreign ministry officials to find out where the 15 captives - 14 men and a woman - were being held, and press British demands to gain access to them and get them released.
British officials said the meeting, the second in two days, was at Britain's request, but it was portrayed in Iranian media as a summons and a dressing down by Iran's foreign ministry.
Britain has not been able to confirm reports that the group had been taken to Tehran.
Foreign office minister David Triesman told television news yesterday: "We don't know where [they are] and I wish we did . . . We have been insisting that they should be released immediately, there is no reason to hold them.
"They should be released unharmed and we should be in a position to assure their families that they are in good health and that they are safe."
British officials would not comment yesterday on a report in the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat, quoting an unnamed military source "close to" the elite al-Quds brigade of Iran's Revolutionary Guards as saying the seizure of the two-boat British patrol had been planned at a high level days in advance.
The aim, according to the report, was to take captives to exchange for senior al-Quds officers arrested by US forces in Irbil, Iraq, earlier in the year.
Lord Triesman said Britain had been given assurances the patrol was not being held hostage for political reasons, and another British official said: "For the time being, we are treating this as an isolated incident."
Whether premeditated or not, the capture of the naval patrol coincides with a particularly low point in UK-Iranian relations, after Britain played a leading role in formulating security council sanctions, imposing an arms export embargo on Iran and freezing the assets of leading members of the Revolutionary Guard and the Iranian state-owned Sepah bank.
The latest UN resolution, aimed at forcing Iran to suspend uranium enrichment was voted into force on Saturday.