The British government on Friday accused Iran of having issued death threats against journalists based in the United Kingdom and for this reason summoned the Iranian charge d’affaires, said the head of diplomacy. “We do not tolerate threats or intimidation from foreign nations against individuals living in the UK,” British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly tweeted.
The summons 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 ( Tehran’s ideological army). According to the group that owns the channel, the scale of the threats prompted the London police to “officially inform the two journalists that these threats pose an imminent, credible and significant risk to their lives and those of their families”.
Dozens of journalists have also been arrested in Iran
Iran International notably covers the protests that have taken place in Iran since the death in mid-September of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd who died three days after her arrest in Tehran by the morality police who accused her of having broken the dress code. of the Islamic Republic, imposing in particular the wearing of the veil for women.
The protest – on a scale that the country had not known for three years – was bloodily repressed, with nearly two hundred dead according to the count of an NGO based outside Iran. Dozens of journalists have also been arrested in the country.
Tensions between the two countries in recent months
But the Iranian authorities accuse London of hosting these Persian channels which are hostile to it and widely cover the demonstrations. They said on Wednesday that the UK was seeking to destabilize the Islamic Republic and was “obviously” involved in pro-protest “propaganda”. 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 Iranian Chargé d’Affaires’ summons to 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 uttered 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 voiced her support for Iranian protesters. “They tried to find out where I live and who I train with,” she said in a BBC interview broadcast on Thursday.