A former UK finance minister, Lamont de Lerwick, has assured Wednesday, after speaking with former British ambassador to Iran Richard Dalton, that the diplomat never met with British-Iranian Alireza Akbari, accused of espionage and executed last week in Iran.
The IRNA news agency reported that the executed Akbari had meetings with an intelligence officer of the UK Intelligence Service, MI6, and former British ambassador Dalton.
However, according to the former finance minister, Dalton has no recollection of meeting with Akbari, who claimed during his detention to have been tortured and interrogated for long periods, forcing him to make false confessions.
«The Iranian regime has suggested that Richard Dalton, our former ambassador to Iran, was the main British contact with Mr. Akbari. When I spoke to him 48 hours ago, he told me that, as far as he knows, he had never met Mr. Akbari in his life, either here in London or in Tehran,» he stressed in the upper chamber.
«Isn’t this yet another lie by the Iranian regime designed to instill in the Iranian people the myth that somehow their problems are caused by foreigners rather than by their own brutal incompetence?» he has added.
Dalton already claimed on Sunday that pressure to add the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to the list of banned terrorist organizations could have played a role in Akbari’s death.
Iran’s Defense Ministry clarified that Akbari never served as the portfolio’s ‘number two’ after Iranian media reported that he had worked as deputy defense minister during the tenure of former President Mohammad Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005).
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
