BRITAIN/IRAN: The British government last night was cautiously optimistic of securing the early release of eight British sailors detained by Iran, despite indications that factions within the Islamic republic were trying to exploit the incident politically.
A spokesman for British Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair said: "We will continue to talk to them [the Iranians] and try and resolve this issue as quickly as possible."
UK officials said they were taking some heart from what they described as the "positive noises" emanating from Iranian news agency reports, suggesting Iran's Revolutionary Guards had been ordered to free the men and they would be handed over to British authorities "in the coming hours or tomorrow morning".
However, the British government was unable to secure formal denial of a report in the Iranian media claiming the British sailors would be put on trial. "We haven't ruled out the positive noises being a smoke screen," said one UK official.
The eight men appeared in blindfolds on Iranian TV yesterday morning, prompting the UK government to summon Iran's ambassador to London to press for their early release.
Later, two of the men appeared to give "confessions" to Iranian TV, saying they had violated Iran's territorial waters.
Separately, the British Foreign Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, held a telephone conversation with his Iranian counterpart, Mr Kamal Kharazzi, to try to prevent the diplomatic incident from developing into a crisis.
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) detained the eight men after seizing three British Royal Navy patrol craft which had allegedly gone into Iranian territorial waters on the Shatt al-Arab waterway on Monday. It was Iran's first big diplomatic incident since parliamentary elections last January, when conservatives won a landslide victory after the reformers boycotted the vote.
According to European diplomats, the incident has been linked to internal anger over a critical report on Iran published last week by the International Atomic Energy Agency. A senior European diplomat involved in Iran said the Islamic Republic was trying to get a "lot of \ mileage" from the incursion into territorial waters by the Royal Navy.
"Iran wants to show that it can enforce some things too. It is feeling under pressure from the IAEA report and the occupation in Iraq," the European diplomat said.
Iran has insisted its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, and it is the one issue on which reformers and conservatives are united, say diplomats.
In Tehran, the arrest of the British sailors by the IRGC has won backing principally from conservative parliamentary figures.