Iran: British-Iranian Woman Put Under Arrest For Allegedly Working with BBC, Foreign Media

A British-Iranian dual national had been arrested for informing foreign media, including the BBC, about protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini.

Iran Fars news agency reported the incident late Wednesday.

The Fars report merely stated that the arrest was made in Iran’s third-largest city of Isfahan by intelligence services and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps without providing further details such as name, gender, or date of arrest.

The detainee was “a source for hostile television channels, specifically the BBC and Iran International,” Fars reported.

In addition, the detainee had “direct link and family ties with some of the channels’ journalists,” the news agency reported.

It has been reported that “beyond working with these television channels, this individual communicated and cooperated with certain counter-revolutionary elements abroad and incited civil disobedience, rioting, security breaches, vandalism, and the destruction of public property during the recent riots.”

The Iranian government, which does not recognize dual citizenship, has blamed Britain for stoking the flames of the protests that have raged in the two months since Amini’s death in the custody of morality police, by hosting hostile Persian-language media.

The BBC has repeatedly accused Iran of threatening and intimidating BBC journalists and their families both at home and abroad.

Since the protests began, the British ambassador to Iran has been summoned by Iran four times.Threats to the lives of British journalists prompted the UK to summon a top Iranian diplomat earlier this month.

Earlier this week, Iran International reported that two British-Iranian journalists working for the channel in the United Kingdom had received “credible” death threats from Iranian security forces.

The channel’s London-based distributor, Volant Media, claimed the two had been the targets of “death threats from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

On Tuesday, Mizan Online reported that a spokesman for Iran’s judiciary, Masoud Setayeshi, said that 40 foreign nationals had been arrested in the wake of the recent “riots.”