The British government on Friday accused Iran of making death threats against UK-based journalists and summoned the Iranian chargé d’affaires for this reason, the diplomatic chief said. “We will not tolerate threats or intimidation by foreign nations against people living in the UK,” British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly tweeted.
The subpoena comes as a London-based Persian-language TV channel – Iran International – reported earlier this week that two of its journalists working in the UK had received death threats from the Revolutionary Guards (Tehran’s ideological army). According to the group that owns the channel, the scale of the threats prompted London Police “to officially inform the two journalists that these threats pose an imminent, credible and significant threat to their lives and that of their families.”
Dozens of journalists were also arrested in Iran
Iran International reports in particular on the protests in Iran since the death in mid-September of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman who died three days after her arrest in Tehran by morality police, who accused her of breaking the Islamic Republic’s dress code , which in particular prescribes the wearing of the veil for women.
The protest – on a scale the country had not seen in three years – was bloodily crushed, with nearly two hundred dead according to an NGO based outside Iran. Dozens of journalists were also arrested in the country.
Tensions between the two countries in recent months
But the Iranian authorities accuse London of hosting these Persian channels hostile to it and have reported extensively on the demonstrations. They said on Wednesday that Britain was trying to destabilize the Islamic Republic and was “obviously” involved in pro-protest “propaganda”. In early October, Iran’s Foreign Ministry invited the British Ambassador to Tehran to protest “the British Foreign Office’s interference in Iran’s internal affairs.”
The announcement of the Iranian chargé d’affaires’ summons to London comes as British police announced on Friday that they had drawn up a “protection plan” for an Iranian wrestling champion, Melika Balali, based in Scotland, who had also received threats to her from Iranian authorities . Melika Balali, 22, who has been an outspoken activist for women’s rights in Iran since leaving the country a year ago, has publicly expressed her support for the Iranian protesters. “They were trying to find out where I live and who I train with,” she said in a BBC interview aired on Thursday.