Iranian leader accuses Britain of arrogance

Iran’s firebrand president on Saturday accused Britain of turning a dispute over his government’s detention of 15 British military personnel in the Persian Gulf into an international crisis.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking in southwest Iran to religious-minded tourists, struck a mostly defensive tone, according to a translation of the speech by the official Iranian news agency.

He repeated anti-Western slogans and suggested that a more conciliatory attitude by Britain might smooth the crisis. He did not hint at an imminent release for the 14 men and one woman; nor did he call for putting them on trial, as have some hard-liners.

“The occupation forces of Britain have strayed into our waters, and our border guards have captured them with courage, knowledge and generosity,” said Ahmadinejad, whose national security powers are superseded by those of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“But instead of apologizing to the Iranian nation, the arrogant play the martyr,” he continued. “The arrogant powers in the world are issuing statements and delivering speeches instead of offering their apologies and expressing their mea culpa.”

Iran’s state-controlled radio said members of the audience, gathered at the site of a famous battle in the Iran-Iraq war, chanted “Death to Britain!” and called for the detainees to be put on trial.

Iranian gunships on March 23 surrounded and detained the 15 British sailors and marines, whom Iran accuses of crossing illegally into its territorial waters in a long-disputed sector of the gulf near the Shatt al Arab waterway, known by Iranians as the Arvand River. Britain contends that the personnel were in Iraqi waters. Both countries say they have satellite images and other evidence to prove their assertions.

The dispute has escalated as Britain sought condemnation of the incident from the United Nations and the European Union, and Iran publicized videotaped and written statements purportedly from two detainees apologizing for entering Iranian waters. Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Saturday reiterated complaints that U.N. and EU involvement only complicated the dispute. Iranians have rebuffed British requests to allow diplomats in Tehran access to the detainees.

The standoff has sent world oil prices to a six-month high and escalated tensions in a waterway already teeming with U.S., British and Iranian military hardware.

At an EU conference in the German port city of Bremen, British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett called the flare-up “regrettable,” short of the apology Iran had sought.

“What we want is a way out of it. We want it peacefully, and we want it as soon as possible,” said Beckett, whose government has come under fire by London media for failing to resolve the crisis. “We would like to be told where our personnel are. We’d like to be given access to them. But we want it resolved.”

At Camp David, President Bush called Tehran’s behavior “inexcusable” and urged the immediate release of the Britons.

“They’re innocent, they did nothing wrong, and they were summarily plucked out of waters,” Bush said in his first comment on the dispute.

Ahmadinejad spoke near old military barracks in the town of Dokuheh, considered hallowed ground by Iranians who revere the sacrifices of those who fought and died in the war against Iraq during the 1980s.

He criticized the United States and Britain for bringing “destruction, massacre and insecurity” upon neighboring Iraq.

“The dictator [Saddam Hussein] has gone away and the weapons of mass destruction have not been unearthed,” he said. “There remain no more reasons for the occupiers to remain in Iraq.”

While taking up anti-Western and nationalist banners, Ahmadinejad, who won election on a populist economic platform in 2005, is blamed for policies that have fueled the inflation and unemployment that are the daily concerns of Iranians. In one of several different accounts of his speech Saturday by official and semiofficial news outlets, he criticized Western powers for “imposing slavery on African families.”

“They initiate wars in order to fill their pockets and sell their arms,” the official IRNA news agency quoted him as saying.

daragahi@latimes.com

Times staff writer Kim Murphy in London contributed to this report.