BERLIN, Nov. 16 (UPI) -- Iran is on a confrontation course with Europe after Tehran accused two German journalists of spying and Iranian security officials allegedly abused French diplomatic personnel in Tehran.
The plainclothes security guards, accompanied by Iranian police, on Sunday arrested guests of the French ambassador as they were trying to enter the French Embassy for a Persian music festival, the BBC reports.
The security guards also "carried out unacceptable acts of violence against French diplomatic personnel," the BBC quotes the French Foreign Ministry as saying.
The French government summoned Iran's ambassador in Paris to "convey in the strongest possible terms this extreme violation of the Vienna Convention," the statement said.
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It came just a few hours after Iran accused two German journalists of spying.
The pair was arrested last month while interviewing Sajjad Ghaderzadeh, the son of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, whose death-by-stoning sentence for adultery drew international condemnation this summer. Iran has shelved the stoning but not the death sentence, saying Ashtiani was also convicted of having helped kill her husband.
Iranian authorities also detained Ghaderzadeh, 22, and Ashtiani's lawyer Houtan Kian, who sat in on the interview in the northwestern city of Tabriz.
Iranian prosecutors said Tuesday that the Germans didn't carry proof that they're journalists and would be tried for spying for a foreign country, which in Iran carries a sentence between three years in prison and the death penalty.
A German journalists' association strongly denied that the Germans were spies.
"Coverage of human rights violations is not spying but important information," Ulrike Kaiser, the journalists' association's deputy chairman, said in a statement.
The editor in chief of German mass weekly Bild am Sonntag said in a statement that the journalists were working on assignment for his newspaper.
The two cases put additional pressure on the West's relations with Iran and could undermine ongoing negotiations with Tehran over the country's controversial nuclear program, observers say.
The German Foreign Ministry has set up a diplomatic working group to free the journalists but with little success.
Arrested in October, the journalists on Monday appeared on state television, with one of them allegedly saying that he was "tricked" into doing the interview by Mina Ahadi, an exiled Iranian human rights activist living in Germany and a thorn in the side of the Iranian regime.
One journalist was quoted as saying by Iran's Press TV that Ahadi sent him to Iran to further her reputation and that he would sue her upon his return to Germany. The statement couldn't be confirmed, as the video clip was dubbed over.
In a telephone interview with United Press International Tuesday, Ahadi said the journalists might have made the comments but added that they were surely pressured by Iranian authorities into doing so.
"They have been in prison for a month, without contacts to the outside world, and who knows what they have had to go through," Ahadi said. "They were probably told that they would be freed if they say these things on TV and, of course, they will try everything to get out. That's completely understandable and I feel great solidarity with them."
Ahadi added that the German Foreign Ministry, which has taken a very careful approach in its attempt to release the prisoners, recently indicated to her that the prisoners could be freed by the end of November.
"With the new espionage allegations, the game changes completely," said Ahadi, whose husband was executed in Iran in the early 1980s. "The German government needs to find a new strategy. Traditional diplomatic channels don't work with this kind of regime."
