Iran confirms arrest of three Americans

Iran’s state owned Arabic-language al-Alam TV station has confirmed that three US citizens were arrested after crossing the border from Iraq.

The report cited a “well-informed source” in the Interior Ministry that the three Americans were detained on Friday after crossing into Iran’s Kurdistan province.

The report said the Americans were arrested after they refused to heed warnings from border guards.

Iraq’s Kurdish regional government’s envoy to Washington, Qubad Talabani, told The Associated Press the three were tourists and mistakenly crossed into Iranian territory at the border town of Ahmed Awaa.

The self-ruled Kurdish region has been relatively free of the violence that plagues the rest of Iraq. Foreigners often feel freer to move around without security guards in the area.

A senior security official in Sulaimaniyah, near the Iranian border in northern Iraq’s oil-rich Kurd region, said the three were last heard from after they contacted a friend saying they entered Iran by mistake and troops surrounded them.

There has been no contact with them since, he said.

The official said the friend they’d contacted, the fourth member of their group, was feeling sick and had stayed behind in Sulaimaniyah. No other details were available.

State Department spokesman Robert Wood said the US Embassy “is aware of the report and is investigating. We are using all available means to determine the facts in this case”.

US helicopters were buzzing overhead and many US Humvees had moved into the Kurdish city of Halabja to search for the Americans, said a Kurdish border force official.

According to the security official, the missing Americans were tourists hiking near Halabja and Ahmed Awaa.

The four had travelled to Turkey, then entered the Kurdish region on Tuesday through the Ibrahim Al-Khalil border point in Zakho, the official said.

They visited the Kurdish cities of Irbil and Sulaimaniyah on Wednesday.

The next day, three of them took a taxi to Ahmed Awaa where they told their companion that they planned to stay at a nearby resort, the official said.

The mountainous border area is a popular hiking destination and well-known for its thick growth of pistachio trees.

Halabja, 150 miles north-east of Baghdad, was the site of a chemical weapons attack ordered by Saddam Hussein in 1988 as part of a scorched-earth campaign to crush a Kurdish rebellion.

An estimated 5,600 people were killed in the nerve and mustard gas attacks – the vast majority Kurds – and many still suffer the after effects.