The release of the British sailors ended a week of detention after their yacht strayed into Iranian waters. The release thwarted a second major diplomatic incident in less than three years between Tehran and Britain, amid increasingly difficult negotiations between Iran and Western powers over its nuclear ambitions. [1]

In March 2007, Iranian authorities detained 15 British naval personnel in the Persian Gulf, claiming the crew was trespassing in Iranian waters. They were held for 13 days before they were freed with a pardon from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. [2]

Iranian authorities seized the sailors after their 60-foot racing yacht strayed less than 500 yards inside Iranian territorial waters. The group was sailing from Bahrain to Dubai in late November when they were stopped by Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps naval vessels. [3]

The crew’s sponsor, Team Pindar, said in a statement Monday that the sailors aboard the "Kingdom of Bahrain" yacht were captured Nov. 25 -- a day before they were to take part in the Dubai-Muscat Offshore Sailing Race, a 360-nautical-mile race. [4]

The crew was identified as Oliver Smith, 31, of Southampton; Oliver Young, 21, of Saltash in Cornwall; Luke Porter, 21, of Weston-super-Mare in Somerset; David Bloomer, originally from Ireland; and Sam Usher. [5] According to Iran's official news agency, IRNA, the sailors were turned over Wednesday to British representatives in Tehran. [6]

The incident in March 2007 also occurred during a time of escalating tensions between Iran and Western powers. The Iranians claimed the British crew was trespassing in its waters while U.K. officials said they were in Iraqi waters at the time. Iran goaded Britain with the capture, televising footage of some of the personnel apologizing for being in Iranian waters, before eventually sending them home in new suits. The crew members later recanted their apologies. [7]

Other foreigners who continue – or are believed -- to be held by Iranian authorities include:

• Three University of California at Berkeley graduate students hikers, all Americans - Joshua Fattal, Shane Bauer, and Sarah Shourd - were arrested after they apparently crossed an unmarked border from Iraq into Iran during a hike through Iraq’s Kurdistan region in July 2009. [8] They have yet to be released despite heavy diplomatic pressure by the United States.
  
• An Iranian-American scholar, Kian Tajbakhsh, has been detained since July 9, 2009. He was charged with spying and in October was sentenced to a 15-year prison term. Charged with crimes against national security, Tajbakhsh was the only American citizen included in a mass show trial of more than 100 people arrested in the aftermath of the disputed presidential election in June. [9]
  
  He appealed that sentence and was transferred to solitary confinement and remained there, losing weight and suffering “huge psychological and physical pressure,” according to a family member. While appealing his sentence he is facing a new charge of spying. Mr. Tajbakhsh, taken before the Revolutionary Court, said that he had already denied the spying charge in the previous court, which nevertheless imposed the 15-year sentence. In the new court, a judge read new charges against him of “spying for the George Soros foundation,” a reference to the Open Society Institute. Previously in 2007, he spent four months in an Iranian prison for “endangering national security.” [10]
  
• U.S. citizen Robert Levinson, a private investigator and a retired FBI agent, has been missing in Iran for more than two years. He vanished just weeks before Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps took 15 British seamen hostage. Levinson was working as a private investigator in Dubai. He was last heard from on March 8, 2007, when, on a business trip, he checked into a Kish Island hotel in the Persian Gulf, and then checked out to return to the United States the following day. At the time of his disappearance Mr. Levinson was looking for leads about cigarette smuggling. [11]
  
  Iranian authorities have said repeatedly they don’t know what might have happened to him. The State Department has consistently denied Levinson was working for the U.S. government and has unsuccessfully pressed Tehran for information about his whereabouts. In April, the Iranian lawyer hired by Mr. Levinson’s family told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that he could not rule out the possibility that Iranian “legal and intelligence bodies” were involved. [12]
  
  In December 2007, Levinson's wife and other relatives traveled to Iran and met with officials who provided no details regarding his whereabouts. [13]
  
  
• Retired Iranian-American businessman Reza Taghavi, 71, was arrested by Iranian officials in May 2008. He has been imprisoned since May 2008 without a trial or formal charges. [14]
  
  
• French citizen Clotilde Reiss, a 24 year-old-graduate student at the eminent Lille Political Sciences Institute, was arrested at the Tehran airport on July 1 as she was leaving for home via Beirut after a five-month stint as an assistant teacher at Isfahan University. She is accused of spying. She was held in Tehran's notorious Evin jail following her arrest. She was one of more than 100 defendants at a televised mass trial Aug. 8. After the trial, she was sent to the French Embassy in Tehran where she still awaits the verdict in her trial. [15]