Iran International TV presenter's family detained to pressure her to resign

The family of an Iran International TV presenter have been detained in her homeland in a bid to force her off the air, the channel has revealed.

The mother, father and younger brother of the presenter, whose identify has not been revealed, are being held by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), it said.

She received a phone call from her father in Iran early on Saturday urging her to resign. Voices of security agents could be heard in the background telling him what to say.

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“I’ve told you a thousand times to resign. What other consequences do you expect? You have to resign,” he told her, according to Iran International.

It comes as seven Iranian men have been charged after two people were arrested during a protest outside the country's embassy on Friday.

The London-based Iran International aims to provide independent coverage of the country but its journalists have previously been targets of threats from the Iranian regime and its proxies.

Pouria Zeraati, host of Iran International's Final Word, was stabbed in the leg outside his home in London in March last year.

Iran International said in a statement that while staff have faced “ongoing harassment, surveillance and intimidation over the years”, the “latest development crosses a new threshold”.

“The deliberate detention of a relative, coupled with the use of psychological torture, represents a cruel and calculated effort to break the will of our journalists by targeting their loved ones,” the channel said.

Spokesman Adam Baillie told The National: “Threats against us are unsurprising but this marks a profoundly worrying turning point in the level of threat.

“You can imagine what effect this has on my colleagues. Harassment of their families is nothing new but the ferocity and nature of the threats has increased, and this one today marks a further notch higher on how far the IRGC is prepared to go in intimidating Iranians abroad.”

Death threats sent to Iran International in early 2023 led to its west London studios being given round-the-clock protection from the Met Police. Some journalists were sent to the US and others told to work from home as concerns for their safety grew.

Later that year, the presenters Sima Sabet and Fardad Farahzad, who both lived in London, were told there was a plot to murder them in a knife attack at their homes.

The plot was foiled when the would-be killer hired by Tehran’s spies turned double agent, according to an investigation by ITN.

The IRGC is said to have offered $200,000 (£149,100) to a people smuggler to kill the journalists after an initial plot to plant a car bomb outside the studio was foiled due to heavy security.

Details of the plot emerged as an IT worker accused of carrying out “hostile reconnaissance” on Iran International was sentenced to three years and six months in jail for collecting information that could be used in a terrorist attack on the channel.

Magomed-Husejn Dovtaev, an Austrian citizen originally from Chechnya, flew from Vienna to London, then went straight to its headquarters, where he secretly filmed material on his phone to "identify vulnerabilities" in security that might be exploited.

Iran can also call on networks of criminals and even its own agents, smuggled into Europe as migrants, to carry out retaliatory attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets.

These include criminals networks, such as two based in Sweden run by Kurdish gangsters Rawa Majid and Ismail Abdo, that have been accused of carrying out attacks on Israeli targets.