Iran to prosecute British sailors

The eight were detained in the Shatt-al-Arab waterway on Monday as they were delivering a patrol boat for the new Iraqi Riverine Patrol Service. The waterway runs along the border between Iran and Iraq.

"They will be prosecuted for illegally entering Iranian territorial waters," the Arabic language Al-Alam television said Tuesday.

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"The vessels were 1,000 meters inside Iranian territorial waters. The crew have also confessed to having entered Iranian waters," the broadcast said.

The British Foreign Office said Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has spoken to Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazzi about the incident.

The waterway, Iraq's main link with the Persian Gulf that divides Iran and Iraq, has long been a source of tension between the neighbors. The 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war broke out after then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein claimed the entire waterway.

Monday's incident follows a strain in Iranian-British relations after London helped draft a resolution rebuking Iran for past nuclear cover-ups at last week's meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency's board of governors.

Iran says its program is aimed only at producing energy, while the United States accuses Tehran of trying to develop nuclear weapons. Iran accused Britain, which it had seen as a partner in the investigation into its nuclear activities, of caving in to US pressure on the resolution.

Iran Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said Monday that Iranian naval guards, "acting upon their legal duty," seized the boats and detained the occupants when they entered Iran's territorial waters, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

Al-Alam television reported that the crew members were carrying maps and weapons.

The British Defence Ministry said the personnel were from the Royal Navy training team based in southern Iraq. They were delivering a boat from Umm Qasr to Basra, Iraq.

"The boats are unarmed but the crews were carrying their personal weapons," a statement said.

AFP adds: Britain and Iran were locked in talks yesterday following the arrests of eight British soldiers who allegedly strayed from Iraq into the Islamic republic's territory, the British embassy said.

"What we are concentrating on now is contacts with the Iranian ministry of foreign affairs and trying to gain access," a diplomat and spokesman at the embassy, Andrew Dunn, told AFP.