An Iranian court has jailed two men from France and Germany for 18 months for illegally entering the Islamic republic’s Gulf waters, as the government insisted the case was not linked to mounting tensions with Europe.
”The verdict is imprisonment. They also face another accusation,” judiciary spokesperson and Justice Minister Jamal Karimi-Rad told reporters on Tuesday. The nature of the other charge was not made clear.
The French and German foriegn ministries confirmed they had been informed the pair, who were arrested in November, were being sent down for 18 months for illegally entering Iranian waters.
The lawyer for German national Donald Klein, who had hired the Frenchman to take him fishing in disputed waters between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Iran, said he would appeal.
”From the day when I officially receive the verdict, I have 20 days to appeal and I definitely intend to do so,” said Abdolsamad Khoramshahi.
The jail term is another diplomatic headache for France and Germany, whose relations with Iran are deteriorating due to tensions over the clerical regime’s nuclear programme.
But Karimi-Rad insisted the verdict and the nuclear standoff were two separate matters, and pointed out that governments had to accept that their law-breaking nationals could be jailed by foreign courts.
”It is a judicial matter. It has nothing to do with such issues,” Karimi-Rad said. ”Our citizens have also been convicted in some of these countries and we have not protested.”
France and Germany, along with Britain and backed by the United States, are pushing for Iran to be referred to the United Nations Security Council in response to Tehran’s decision to resume sensitive uranium enrichment research earlier this month.
Iran says it only wants to generate electricity, but there are fears its fuel cycle drive could hand the clerical regime the know-how to make nuclear weapons.
A referral of the matter to New York could come during an emergency meeting of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency on February 2.
The Western powers have also been harshly critical of Iran’s hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his series of anti-Israeli outbursts — which included a call for Israel to be ”wiped off the map”.
Klein’s wife had told German public radio on January 17 that he had been sentenced to an 18-month jail term and said she would attempt to appeal the ruling, insisting her 52-year-old husband was innocent.
A court in the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas held a preliminary hearing into the case on January 5, with the pair arguing they entered Iranian waters by accident.
Several areas in the waters between Iran and the UAE are disputed, notably the island of Abu Mussa close to where the two were detained. The two men said they had mistakenly used Emirati maps that did not show the current maritime boundaries.
Their disappearance was first reported on November 29 by Klein’s wife when he failed to return from a fishing trip. The German man had been on holiday in the UAE, which lies across the Gulf from Iran.
The identity of the French national has not been revealed.
Just weeks before the pair were detained, Iranian authorities released a British couple and an Australian who had been detained for 13 days after sailing into Iranian waters from the UAE.
Germany is no stranger to legal wranglings with Tehran.
In 1997 a German court implicated senior Iranian officials in the murder of Iranian Kurdish dissident exiles at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin five years earlier.
Later in 1997, German businessman Helmut Hofer was arrested in Tehran and then sentenced to death for having illicit relations with an Iranian Muslim woman. He was eventually acquitted and then fined on a lesser charge before being released in 2000. – AFP
