Britain’s Foreign Office has refuted reports on the arrest of a British diplomat in Iran.
“Reports of the arrest of a British diplomat in Iran are completely false,” a foreign ministry spokesman said in London.
On Wednesday, Iran’s Fars news agency and state television had reported that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps had arrested — on an unspecified date —several foreign diplomats including British deputy head of mission Giles Whitaker, accusing them of “spying.”
Britain’s ambassador to Iran on Thursday said the diplomat had ended his term and left Iran in December 2021.
Video footage showed images of a man presented as Whitaker speaking in a room.
“These reports that our Deputy Ambassador is currently detained are very interesting... He actually left Iran last December, at the end of his posting,” British ambassador Simon Shercliff wrote on Twitter.
The Fars report said Whitaker was captured on drone footage with others “sampling the soil of the forbidden area” in the Shahdad Desert in central Iran,
Iranian state television, meanwhile, showed videos of the group appearing to collect soil samples and take pictures in the desert, where the IRGC’s aerospace missile exercises were conducted.
Fars said that Whitaker had been expelled from Iran after apologizing. But state TV said only that he had been expelled from “the area” where the diplomats were arrested.
State television accused him of “carrying out intelligence operations” in military areas, AFP reported.
A state TV journalist said the diplomat “was among those who went to the Shahdad desert with his family as tourists.”
The report linked the incident to Israel, accusing it of “using nationals from third countries who are linked to foreign embassies” to investigate “the possible military dimension of Iran’s nuclear program”. No evidence was provided for the connection with Israel.
One man was identified in the state television report as “Maciej Walczak, head of the microbiology department at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland.”
“This university is linked to the Zionist regime,” it said, referring to Israel.
Walczak, whose nationality was not specified, “entered Iran with three other people in the context of scientific exchanges, but he went to the desert region of Shahdad as a tourist while missile tests were being carried out,” state television said. It said he took rock and soil samples.
But a spokesman for the university, where Walczak is reported to be an expert in environmental microbiology, said it was “an old story.”
“Iran cites the names of three people, two of whom have returned to Torun for months,” the spokesman said.
