Iran courted new levels of post-election isolation from the European Union on Wednesday as European diplomats pondered whether to withdraw the ambassadors of all 27 member nations in a dispute over the detention of the British Embassy’s local personnel.

European diplomats said that no formal decision to order their envoys home had been taken, but that the measure was an option under consideration as the European Union — Iran’s biggest trading partner — tries to work out how to defuse the dispute in a way that would shield other embassies in Tehran from similar action.

Withdrawing all 27 ambassadors would represent a rare and unusually forceful display of European anger at Iran’s behaviour, and several diplomats said the European Union would prefer to avoid it.

The initial Iranian response seemed characteristically bellicose. A high-ranking military official demanded that the Europeans apologise for interference in Iran’s affairs, which, he said, disqualified European countries from negotiating on the fraught issue of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

In a statement quoted by the Fars news agency on Wednesday, Iran’s chief of staff, Hassan Firouzabadi, was quoted as saying that because of EU’s “interference” in “the post-election riots, they have lost their qualification to hold nuclear talks with Iran”.

“Before apologising for their huge mistake,” he said, the European countries have “no right to talk about nuclear negotiations”, according to a Fars report. It was the first sign that Iran might use its post-election dispute to cast further doubt over the stalled nuclear negotiations, buying time to continue a nuclear enrichment programme.

... contd.