By Alan Cowell

LONDON, March 27, 2007 - As tensions escalate between Iran and the West, Prime Minster Tony Blair warned Tuesday that Britain's campaign to free 15 captured sailors and marines would move into a "different phase" if they were not released by Tehran.

Just days after the UN Security Council voted for tougher sanctions against Iran in the separate dispute over its nuclear ambitions, Blair's remarks seemed designed to ratchet up pressure on Iran and counter criticism at home that his government had responded timidly to the crisis. The eight British sailors and seven marines captured by Iran include one woman identified Tuesday as Faye Turney, 26.

Blair said Tuesday on GMTV television that Britain was trying "to make the Iranian government understand these people have to be released and that there is absolutely no justification for holding them."

"I hope we manage to get them to realize they have to release them," Blair said. "If not, then this will move into a different phase. But at the moment what we're trying to do is make sure that that diplomatic initiative works."

Officials in Blair's office and at the Foreign Office said the prime minister had been referring specifically to a tougher diplomatic posture, not to military or other more confrontational means - even as United States warships maneuvered in the Gulf in their biggest naval exercises there since the invasion of Iraq four years ago. To underscore the British point, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, who was visiting Turkey, a neighbor of Iran, telephoned her counterpart in Tehran on Tuesday and "spoke in very robust terms reiterating the U.K.'s concern about the continued detention of our personnel," a Foreign Office spokesman in London said, speaking in return for customary anonymity.

But Iran renewed its insistence on Tuesday that the Britons had entered Iranian waters illegally and would be investigated before any consular access was permitted.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mohammad Ali Hosseini, told the official IRNA press agency that issues surrounding the captured Britons would be resolved "under the aegis of restraint and respect for rules and regulations."

"Media-run propaganda and indiscreet and sometimes provocative remarks" would not resolve "the issue of violation by British forces of Iran's territorial waters," he said, adding, "The British sailors have illegally strayed into Iran's territorial waters and they are being accorded due process of law."

He said Iranian interrogators were treating the 15 Britons in a "humane, Islamic and respectful" manner. But he said that the British Embassy would be able to contact them "only after the preliminary investigations are complete."

The sailors and marines were captured last week in two boats after they inspected a cargo vessel for contraband in disputed waters. Britain insists that the military personnel were in Iraqi waters under the authority of the United Nations. "We have been relatively polite in what we have said, but we are getting increasingly impatient with the lack of cooperation" from Iran, the Foreign Office spokesman said.

He and Blair's spokesman both said one way of increasing pressure on Tehran would be to publicize evidence, such as coordinates from satellite navigation devices, establishing the whereabouts of the British personnel at the time Iranian vessels surrounded them at gunpoint Friday. That could mean that Britain was accusing Iran of entering Iraq's territorial waters unlawfully.

In her conversation with the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, Beckett demanded "the safe and speedy return" of the British personnel and "immediate consular access" so that Britain could see for itself that its citizens were in good health, as Iran insists they are, the Foreign Office spokesman said.

The British government seems to be feeling increasingly uneasy at the way the crisis is unfolding compared with a similar episode in 2004 when Iran captured eight British military personnel and released them after three nights, during which they were subjected to blindfolding and mock executions.

The fate of the latest captured personnel has provoked some barbs that the government is appeasing their kidnappers. An editorial in The Times of London on Tuesday condemned "the pusillanimous timidity of British officials and politicians, who have failed disgracefully to confront Iran with the ultimatum this flagrant aggression demands."

Such perceptions put Blair under political pressure to adopt a harder line with Iran, but other voices still counsel caution. Andrew Green, a former British ambassador to Syria and Saudi Arabia, said he hoped the service personnel "do not turn into hostages."

"Hostage problems are among the most difficult that the Foreign Office has to deal with," Green said. "The more publicity there is, the more valuable the hostages become to the hostage takers and the less willing they are to release them," he said in an article in The Daily Telegraph. "Threats will not help. The answer lies in patient diplomacy.'The assessment reflected speculation that the Britons may have been seized as bargaining chips to press for the release of Iranians held by American forces in Iraq.

But Blair insisted in his televised remarks that the destiny of Iranians held in Iraq "should have absolutely no bearing because any Iranian forces who are inside Iraq are breaching the UN mandate and undermining the democratically elected government of Iraq. So they've got no cause to be there at all. The two situations are completely distinct."

According to The Associated Press, the U.S. Navy has begun an exercise with two aircraft carriers and more than 100 planes in the Gulf. But the show of force was not a response to the capture of the British personnel, and American vessels would not enter Iranian waters, The Associated Press quoted an unidentified U.S. Navy commander as saying.

Hosseini, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, said the captured Britons were in "completely good health." He said that in the case of Turney, the female captive, "definitely all ethics have been observed."

But Beckett told reporters in Turkey that if the captives were being held "in reasonable circumstances then we can see no reasons why they should not have contact with people from the British government."

Beckett cut short her visit to Turkey to fly home Tuesday. She was set to address the British Parliament on Wednesday.

Source: The New York Times

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