Iran arrests British Council employee as she visits home country

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.

Speaking on Wednesday, Omrani confirmed his cousin’s arrest in Iran. In a public post on Facebook he wrote: “Aras has been jailed by forces belonging to Iran’s ministry of intelligence. They arrested her before the Eid [Persian new year] and it’s now nearly 50 days that she is being kept in [Tehran] Evin prison’s ward 209.”

Omrani said Amiri had been accused of colluding and acting against the national security, a vague charge used by Iran’s intelligence apparatus against a wide range of activists, journalists and other Iranians arrested for political reasons. Her lawyer has not yet had any access to her, according to her cousin.

Before her arrest Amiri had been living in London for 10 years. She has a residence permit and is studying for a postgraduate degree in philosophy of art at Kingston University. “Simultaneously she has been working for the British Council,” wrote Omrani. “She has worked on film festivals and cultural exchanges between UK and Iran, and more importantly some of her activities have been in cooperation with the artistic department of [Iran’s] cultural ministry.”

Omrani said Amiri had visited Iran frequently in the past without any issues. “She never had any problems before,” he said. “She went to Iran this time for a brief visit to see her grandmother who is in hospital in [the city] of Amol.”

The British Council said Amiri had not been on a work assignment during her visit to Iran. A spokesperson said the Council was aware that “one of our staff has been detained in Iran while making a private family visit, the colleague is an Iranian national”.

The spokesperson added: “The British Council does not have offices or representatives in Iran. We work remotely to develop long-term people-to-people cultural links with Iran as we do in over 100 other countries.”

Iran has a history of hostility towards the British Council, which is a UK charity governed by royal charter and a UK public body, but receives a 15% core funding grant from the UK government.

In 2009, Iran closed the British Council offices in Tehran in reaction to the launch, in London, of BBC’s Persian service, which is loathed by the Iranian establishment. In June 2009, following unrest in the aftermath of a disputed presidential election, Iran arrested several local staff working for the British embassy in Tehran.

The new arrests, which signal that Iran is intensifying a crackdown on British dual nationals or those linked with British institutions, deals a blow to the UK foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, who visited Tehran last year to lobby the Iranian government over Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s continued imprisonment.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case has become intertwined with Johnson’s political career since he made an erroneous statement last year which appeared to complicate her legal battle. Johnson has since apologised for mistakenly saying that she had been training journalists in Iran, while in fact she was on holiday.

Richard Ratcliffe, Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband, said his heart went out to all those newly arrested in Iran. “It is a cruel business, and a disorienting one. For Nazanin, we had hoped that the foreign secretary’s trip to Tehran in December and follow-up measures would have improved relations between the UK and Iran, and helped make things better for Nazanin and the others held,” he said on Wednesday. “Instead they seemed to stall in the spring, even get worse. It is an uncertain time between Iran and the West at present. The foreign secretary does not have an easy job.”

An FCO spokeswoman said: “We will continue to approach each case in a way that we judge is most likely to secure the outcome we all want. Therefore we will not be providing a running commentary on every twist and turn.”