TEHRAN – An Iranian lawmaker has said that the foreign diplomats who had been detained by the IRGC intelligence were secretly taking samples of Iranian soil from an off-limit area in central Iran deserts to conduct testing for traces of potential nuclear work. 

The lawmaker, Esmail Kowsari, who is sitting on Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, said the sampling was a type of espionage. “This was definitely a type of espionage. The hostile countries had told these people to collect soil from some places they suspected to be suspicious so that it could be tested. Foreign spies should know that our security apparatuses have not and will not leave them alone and are constantly monitoring them,” Kowsari, a former IRGC general, told Fars News.

In early July, the IRGC announced that it detained a number of foreign diplomats who were collecting soil samples deep inside Kerman deserts where the IRGC had just conducted a missile drill. The IRGC said at the time that the British deputy ambassador to Iran was among the arrested. 
 
“These criminals do not consider that America has more than 5,000 and the Zionist regime [Israel] has more than 250 nuclear warheads, but even though we say through official and media announcements that we are enriching uranium for electricity production and agricultural issues, they want to take measures against us through cooking up documents and stealing Iranian soil,” Kowsari said. 

He added, “The Westerners should know that the situation has changed now and today no one cares about such issues in order to use them to cook up documents against us.”

Underlining that “we are doing our own work and do not pay attention to these things,” he said, “Westerners are not people who consider themselves the owners of everything. Those days when they considered themselves the owners of the whole world are over. We are doing our own thing and they have to run after us to see if they catch up or not.”