Diplomat: Royal Mail Service to Iran Re-Established

Iranian Ambassador to London Hamid Baeidinejad announced that Britain’s top posting service company the Royal Mail has restored its operations to the destination of Iran.

Baeidinejad said in a tweet on Saturday that a Royal Mail cargo had reached Iran earlier in the day and the company would announce the full restoration of its services to the country in the near future.

“The postal cargo of the company arrived in Iran today. The full normalization of the Royal Mail activities (in Iran) will be announced soon,” read part of Baeidinejad’s post on Twitter.

The envoy said the company had agreed as part of consultations last week to send the existing cargos to the Iran destination and then begin to restore all activities in the country.

Back in April, Baeidinejad had warned the posting company to end disruption of postal services to Iran, threatening to file a complaint with the Universal Postal Union (UPU).

"There are ongoing efforts to resolve the disruption of postal services to Iran from the UK, apparently due to operational issues. We hope that the issues would be resolved very quickly. Access to postal services is a fundamental civil right and should be ensured by all means," Baeidinejad wrote on his twitter page on April 16.

He cautioned that if the ongoing efforts to resolve the problems related to the issue fail to yield results, "we will use all possibilities to cancel this illegal act".

"Legally, the embassy will study the possibility for lodging a complaint with the local courts and the UPU against the Royal Mail and will try to find a way to send the postal data-x-items of our countrymen to Iran if the time of restrictions procrastinates," Baeidinejad stressed.

A week earlier, Royal Mail had confirmed suspending mail delivery services to recipient addresses in Iran, citing Washington’s sanctions against the country.

The mail service said that services had already been suspended for the last two weeks and that any remaining parcel in Britain would be returned to the original sender.

Following the announcement, Baeidinejad said that the matter had been followed up with related British authorities, adding that a letter of protest had been sent to the UK’s Foreign Office.

He said that British authorities had promised to resolve the issue as soon as possible, requesting that they be given “until Monday” to address the problem.

Baeidinejad also said that UK authorities “were shocked” by the Royal Mail announcement.

The Iranian ambassador further stated that his mission in London itself would envision a channel to deliver parcels to Iran free of charge given that the problem persisted beyond the Monday deadline.

The suspension of mail delivery to Iran was allegedly done on the pretext of US sanctions targeting Iran.