British motorcycling couple detained in Iran charged with espionage

London: British couple detained in Iran have been charged with espionage after travelling to the country as part of a round-the-world motorbike trip.

The Iranian judiciary’s Mizan news agency said Craig and Lindsay Foreman, who are in their early 50s, had been charged after allegedly gathering information in different locations in the country.

The couple had crossed into Iran from Armenia on 30 December for a five-day visit, according to social media posts, and were reportedly arrested in January. The last post on their Facebook page, from Isfahan, in Iran, on 3 January, included selfies with the caption: “What a wonderful place.”

The detention of the two British nationals and charges of espionage comes as the new Iranian ambassador to the UK, Seyyed Ali Mousavi takes up his post.

Recent economic sanctions reimposed on Iran by the US have placed the UK and other European powers under further pressure to distance themselves from the country.

According to Amnesty International, the penalty for espionage in Iran can range from two years in jail to the death penalty. However, it is unclear how these penalties apply to foreign nationals.

Since 2010, at least 66 foreign and dual nationals have been detained by Iran, according to research by the University of Essex in 2022, part of a growing practice of “politically motivated arrests” that has been decried by Human Rights Watch.

After the death in September 2022 of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman of Kurdish origin who had been arrested three days earlier for allegedly breaching the Islamic dress code, at least 40 foreign and dual nationals were arrested.

Last week, Iranian state media published photographs showing the UK ambassador, Hugo Shorter, meeting two British “national security” suspects at the general and revolutionary prosecutor’s office in Kerman province, about 500 miles south-east of Tehran.

The photo, with blurred faces of two individuals sitting across from Shorter, shows that the meeting on Wednesday was held in the presence of the Kerman prosecutor Mehdi Bakhshi and Kerman governor’s deputy for security and law enforcement, Rahman Jalal.

Relatives of the Foremans spoke of their concern at the couple’s “distressing situation” . The pair are being held in the southern city of Kerman.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian dual national freed in 2022 after five years in a Tehran prison, was transferred to Kerman after her initial arrest. In 2016, she was detained for more than 150 days and later sentenced to five years in jail for spying. At the time, the UK accused Iran of using the dual citizen as a “pawn for diplomatic leverage”.

On Sunday, Richard Ratcliffe, Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband, called on UK ministers to act “more promptly” than they did in his wife’s case. “A court process may soon come. It’s not a real court. But it will be a form of brutal theatre to get the government’s attention,” said Ratcliffe.

The Foreign Office has been approached for comment.

The UK government advises against all travel to Iran, saying British and dual nationals are at significant risk of arrest, questioning or detention, and that a British passport or UK connections “can be reason enough” to be detained by Iranian authorities.