A London-based British Council employee has been arrested during a family visit to Iran, as the authorities in the country step up targeting people with ties to UK institutions.
Aras Amiri, a 32-year-old Iranian national, was visiting her home country to see her ailing grandmother before the Persian new year, in March, when she was detained, said her cousin, Mohsen Omrani.
Amiri’s detention is the latest in a string of recent arrests involving British dual nationals or Iranians linked with British institutions. Last week it emerged that Abbas Edalat, a professor at Imperial College London, had been arrested in April by the hardline Revolutionary Guards.
The Foreign Office said it was also “urgently seeking information from the Iranian authorities” after being asked about the arrest of Mahan Abedin, an Iranian-British dual national and UK-based analyst and writer.
Mahan Abedin’s publisher, Michael Dwyer from Hurst Publishers, said they were worried that he might have run into trouble during a recent visit to Tehran. “While we heard from Mahan by email on Monday, we have no way of verifying that his messages are genuine, and his long radio silence till then had puzzled us, given the recent arrest of other British citizens of Iranian descent,” he said.
The new cases are a worrying development for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British woman who is serving a five-year jail sentence in Tehran on alleged spying charges and whose family insists she is being punished as a tool of diplomatic pressure.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
