40 foreigners arrested during Amini protests

Officials accuse West of stoking demonstrations

Iran has arrested 40 foreign nationals during over two months of protests sparked by the death in morality police custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, the judiciary said on Tuesday.

“Forty foreign nationals implicated in the recent riots have been arrested,” judiciary spokesman Masoud Setayeshi said in comments carried by its Mizan Online news website.

He did not elaborate on the nationalities of those detained and gave no other details.

Iranian officials have repeatedly accused Western governments of stoking the protests over Amini’s death.

A number of Westerners, some of them dual nationals, were already in custody in Iran before the latest protests broke out in September.

French teachers’ union official Cecile Kohler and her partner Jacques Paris were detained in May, following teachers’ strikes earlier in the year.

Espionage charges

Both have been charged with espionage and have been held in isolation since their arrests, French trade union sources have said.

“The two French spies remain in custody and their case is in the final decision stage,” Setayeshi said on Tuesday, without elaborating.

In early October, state television broadcast what it said were “espionage confessions” by the two French detainees.

The French government condemned the airing of the alleged confessions as “shameful, revolting and unacceptable” and described the pair as “state hostages” for the first ti me.