The British government accused Iran on Friday of having issued death threats against journalists based in the United Kingdom and summoned the Iranian charge d’affaires for this reason, said the head of diplomacy.
“I have summoned the Iranian charge d’affaires today after journalists working in the UK received death threats from Iran,” British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly tweeted.
“We do not tolerate threats or intimidation by foreign nations against people living in the UK,” he added.
Threats that pose “an imminent, credible and significant risk to their lives”
The call comes as a London-based Persian-language television channel, Iran International, reported earlier this week that two of its journalists working in the UK had received death threats from the Revolutionary Guards (the ideological army from Tehran).
According to the group that owns the channel, the magnitude of the threats led the London police to “officially inform the two journalists that these threats represent an imminent, credible and significant risk to their lives and those of their families.”
Iran International covers in particular the protests that have taken place in Iran since the mid-September death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman who died three days after her arrest in Tehran by the moral police who accused her of rape. the dress code of the Islamic Republic, imposing in particular the use of the veil for women.
Pro-protest “propaganda”
The protest – on a scale that the country has not known for three years – is repressed in blood, with almost two hundred deaths according to the count of an NGO based outside of Iran. Dozens of journalists have also been arrested in the country.
But the Iranian authorities accuse London of hosting these Persian channels that are hostile to them and extensively cover the demonstrations. They felt on Wednesday that the UK was trying to destabilize the Islamic Republic and was “obviously” engaged in “propaganda” in favor of the protests.
Iran denounces “British interference in internal affairs of Iran”
In early October, the Iranian Foreign Office summoned the British ambassador to Tehran to protest against “the British Foreign Office’s interference in Iran’s internal affairs.”
The announcement of the summons for the Iranian charge d’affaires in London comes as British police announced on Friday that they had put in place a “protection plan” for an Iranian wrestling champion living in Scotland, Melika Balali, who also received threats. according to her by the 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 tried to find out where she lives and who she trains with,” she said in a BBC interview broadcast on Thursday.
Source: BFM TV
