June 21, 2004
Fox news
TEHRAN, Iran — Iranian state television reported Monday that Iranian forces had seized three British naval vessels on the Iraqi border and arrested their crews, according to wire reports.
A British military spokesman in Iraq confirmed that contact had been lost with three patrol boats.
British officials did not confirm that the boats had been captured or the crewmembers detained.
The Foreign Office said British diplomats in Tehran had been in contact with the Iranian government but it was still unclear what had happened.
Iran's Arabic-language al-Alam news channel reported that the boats had been seized on the Shatt al-Arab waterway, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers empty into the Persian Gulf and which also serves as the southernmost border between Iraq and Iran.
"The Iranian navy has confiscated three British boats that entered Iranian territorial waters" Sky News' Web site quoted an Iranian official as telling al-Alam, "arresting the crew of eight people."
The sources added that "weapons and maps" had been found on the boats, and that the crews had admitted making a "mistake."
It also said the ships were confiscated at about 11 a.m. (2:30 a.m. EDT) between the Bahmanshir and Arvand rivers, which would put them in the Shatt al-Arab east of the Iraqi city of Faw. The broadcast gave no further details.
Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi confirmed the report, according to Iran's main Persian-language TV channel.
"Interrogation of those detained will continue until the matter is clarified," Asefi was quoted as saying.
"I can confirm that three small Royal Navy patrol boats and eight crew have been out of communication since the early hours of this morning," said a British military spokesman in the southern Iraqi city of Basra on condition of anonymity. "It is not unusual for the Royal Navy to be patrolling the Shatt-al-Arab."
The Royal Navy has been training Iraqi personnel in coastal defense for several weeks on the waterway, and it is possible that the vessels were part of that exercise.
The Shatt al-Arab has often been contested by both Iraq and Iran, and the area was the scene of heavy fighting during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War.
Iranian-British relations have been strained in recent days, since London helped draft a resolution at the International Atomic Energy Agency's board of governors meeting last week in Vienna that rebuked Iran for past nuclear cover-ups. Iran accused Britain of caving in to U.S. pressure.
Iran says its program is aimed only at producing energy, while the United States accuses Tehran of trying to develop nuclear weapons.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,123233,00.html