Judiciary Chief Blasts UK Foreign Secretary's Anti-Iran Claims

"The UK foreign secretary is in no position to warn branches of the Islamic Republic," Amoli Larijani said in a meeting with judicial officials.

Iran's judiciary chief said that the Islamic Republic today acts independently and no country can dictate its policies.

"A while ago, the British foreign secretary warned the Establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in an offensive way before traveling to Iran to refrain from imprisonment of dual nationals. Such way of dealing is similar to the colonial powers' manner in the past centuries, but they do not care that the Islamic Republic is now different from the old puppet governments that used to get frightened by foreign powers’ warnings," he added.

He noted that dual nationality is a legal and judicial matter without having any criminal effects per se, and said, "The only reason for these heavy attacks against the judiciary is that we stand against the enemy's infiltration attempts and mobilizing forces as well as spending millions of dollars by the Western countries to undermine the judicial authorities of the Islamic Republic simply because of this resistance against their influence.”

Amoli Larijani went on to say that the UK still owes money to Iran for the arm sales to Pahlavi regime, but, he pointed out that is a different legal case.

Amoli Larijani's remarks came after British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt pointed to the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe a dual Iranian-British national.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a 40-year-old project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in Tehran in April 2016 as she was returning to Britain.

While the British media have claimed that she was arrested after a family visit, Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told a parliamentary committee in November 2017 that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was "simply teaching people journalism as I understand it" when she was arrested at Tehran airport.

Meantime, in November 2017,  Iranian Ambassador to London Hamid Baeedinejad said that Britain is due to pay its £400mln debt to Tehran soon, dismissing any link between the payment and the case of Zaghari.

Over £400-mln ($596mln) sum will be transferred to the Central Bank of Iran “in the coming days”, Baeedinejad wrote on his Telegram channel at the time.

The Iranian diplomat further expressed regret over certain media attempts to link the debt pay-off to the case of Zaghari.

The payment “with regard to a 1974 arms deal has nothing to do with the case of Nazanin Zaghari who has been arrested in Iran over security charges or to any other issue,” Baeedinejad told reporters in November 2017.

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