‘Tehran wants journalists like me killed – why doesn’t Britain act?’

Sima Sabet tells Rob Hastings how she was targeted by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in the UK

Worshippers chant anti-Israeli slogans after a prayer gathering in Tehran yesterday actually makes a decision based on his own internal calculations and not what his advisers tell him,” says Jon Alterman, senior vice president and director of the Middle East programme at Washington’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Alterman wonders whether Trump may surprise everyone. “There’s a possibility that we have a return to a policy of maximum pressure” on Tehran, he says. “But there’s also a possibility that just as Trump decided he was going to negotiate with Kim Jong-un, that he would try to negotiate with the Iranians.”

The idea of Tehran seeking to engage Trump, he claims, “has been percolating in Iran for quite some time… I can tell you there’s a previous Iranian foreign minister who told me the advice that he got from the North Koreans was, talk to Trump directly…

“I don’t know anybody in the United States who would bet their house that Donald Trump, when presented with an opportunity to make a historic negotiated agreement with the Iranians, wouldn’t decide to explore it.”

As for Trump’s relationship with Israel, Alterman argues that anything could happen.

“He’s not said a whole bunch of crazy things,” he says. “He’s let people fill in the blank in any way.”

She survived a plot to kill her on Britain’s streets. Her former colleague is lucky to be alive after being stabbed outside his home. Threats of rape and murder are sent to her and many of her associates every day.

So how, asks Sima Sabet, can the Government refuse to label the people responsible as terrorists? Sabet is a renowned journalist who until recently worked at the UK-based news channel Iran International, which is popular in Iran for its damning stories about the country’s ruthless regime.

A plot to assassinate her in London was uncovered last year. Evidence suggests it was planned by Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a suggestion the Iranian embassy rejects.

Its diplomats also deny responsibility for the attack on presenter Pouria Zeraati in London last month.

But Sabet and many other members of Britain’s Iranian community are furious at the UK for not proscribing the IRGC, given its widespread blame for a decadeslong campaign of violence and intimidation against opponents in the UK and around the world.

“The IRGC is allowed to operate freely in the UK and come that close to killing a journalist,” she said. “They’re not going to stop harming us here in the UK. But the question is: are we protected?

“Apparently, the British government doesn’t want to take a very strong stand against their operations inside the UK. Which is a pity, because by not showing any strong reaction, those will continue. “Are we going to stop it? Or do we have to wait for another person to be stabbed or killed tomorrow?” Several other British-Iranian dissidents who fear for their lives after sinister harassment tell i they share Sabet’s frustrations.

The Government has so far resisted proscribing the IRGC because of its important links to the top of the Iranian regime.

The Prime Minister feels that officially calling it a terrorist organisation – leading to many political and financial ramifications – might curtail the UK’s ability to communicate diplomatically with Tehran’s leadership.

It may result in the UK embassy in the capital being shut down, which would remove “one of

Are we going to stop it? Do we have to wait for another person to be stabbed or killed?