US military frees five Iranian diplomats in Iraq: IRNA

TEHRAN: Five Iranian diplomats held by the US military in Iraq since January 2007 were freed on Thursday, the official IRNA news agency said, quoting Tehran’s ambassador to Baghdad, AFP reported.

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‘The five Iranian diplomats abducted in Iraq were handed over by the occupying US forces to the Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki,’ the ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qomi said.

He said the five men would be handed over to the Iranian embassy in Baghdad after meeting Maliki.

Their detention has long been a source of additional friction in the hostile relations between Iran and its archfoe the United States.

‘The five Iranians were released and they are in the hands of the Iraqi government. We should receive them in the next hours,’ a source at the Iranian embassy in Baghdad said.

The US embassy in the Iraqi capital had no immediate comment.

The US military, which accuses Iran of funding and equipping Shia militias in Iraq, had arrested the five at an office in the Kurdish city of Arbil in northern Iraq on January 11, 2007.

It accused them of being agents for Tehran, arming militias and inciting anti-US attacks in Iraq.

The arrests triggered a diplomatic row, with Tehran accusing US forces in Iraq of violating international diplomatic regulations, but Washington and the US military in Iraq maintained they had no diplomatic status.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari had said that the five Iranians had been working in Arbil with official sanction, but that their ‘liaison office’ had not yet become a full consulate.

The US military continues to hold between and 10,000 and 11,000 detainees in American-run prisons in Iraq even though US forces pulled out of towns and cities across the country on June 30.

The five Iranian men were identified by Iran’s state broadcaster as Mohsen Bagheri, Mahmoud Farhadi, Majid Ghaemi, Majid Dagheri and Abbas Jami.

Soon after taking office in January, US President Barack Obama called for dialogue with Iran after three decades of severed ties.

But relations took a turn for the worse again after the Iranian authorities cracked down on massive public protests over the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June.

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