Iran on Friday demanded that Kenya to release two of its citizens who were charged by a Nairobi court with planning a terrorist act after being arrested for filming the Israeli embassy, AFP reported.
The two men, Sayed Nasrollah Ebrahimi and Abdolhosein Gholi Safaee, are "official lawyers of the justice ministry... who travelled to Nairobi on behalf of the families of two Iranian prisoners in Kenya for a legal follow-up", claimed foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi.
Ebrahimi and Safaee were arrested Tuesday by Kenyan anti-terrorism police after filming outside the Israeli embassy, allegedly in an Iranian embassy car.
The men, along with a Kenyan driver also charged on Thursday, had been to Kamiti prison outside Nairobi to visit two other Iranians, Ahmad Mohammed and Sayed Mousavi, serving a 15-year term for possessing explosives after being convicted in 2013.
Mohammed and Mousavi were reportedly planning to attack Israeli, American, British and Saudi targets in Kenya when they were arrested in 2012.
Ghasemi said the arrest of the two lawyers who were charged on Thursday had been the result of a "misunderstanding" after "the intervention of some third parties into the case", and called for their immediate release.
Kenya's ambassador to Tehran was called to the foreign ministry on Thursday and told of the "hostile intervention of a third party in a finished case, undoubtedly with the intention of damaging good Iran-Kenya relations", Ghasemi said, without specifically referring to Israel.
(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)