The UAE has condemned as “provocative and dangerous precedence” a planned visit by Iran’s Shura Council members to its occupied islands in the Arabian Gulf, the state news agency WAM reported on Tuesday.
The UAE’s Federal National Council (parliament) said the planned visit by Iran’s national security and foreign affairs officials to the islands - Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs – violates its sovereignty and impedes efforts to finding a political solution to the problem.
‘‘The escalating measures, which Iran used to do, can never alter the historic and legal facts that prove the islands are part and parcel of the UAE territories,’’ according to the Federal National Council (FNC) statement.
Iran seized the islands in 1971, when colonial-era Britain pulled out from that area of the Arabian Gulf. Tehran insists the islands are a historic part of its territory and stations military forces on the largest of them.
The UAE says the islands are its own under an agreement signed with Britain, and has support from other Gulf Arab states and its ally the United States.
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