How Iran warned that Britain would pay for hosting dissident journalists

“There are times that I think I have a good story that I want to work on, but then I think is it really worth it?” one reporter said. “They are going to attack me, and maybe they are going to interrogate my mum again and she can’t tolerate it.”

Other journalists believe that their families are not even safe in the UK, with one reporter saying; “I wake up in the middle of the night. I check my son to see if he’s there. I don’t let him play in the garden on his own. I have to be there – I’m on alert constantly.”

The threat shows no sign of abating, with the BBC submitting a new complaint to the United Nations on Tuesday, reporting that several journalists had been convicted in absentia by a court in Tehran for “propaganda against the Islamic Republic”.

Senior Conservative MPs are calling for tougher action against the Iranian regime. The Government is facing pressure to proscribe Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist group.

Sir John Whittingdale, who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Media Freedom, says that while counter-terror police had acted swiftly to protect Iran International, there was a “wider question about the Government’s response to Iran”, adding: “The most recent incident takes it to a level which hasn’t happened before. The fact they felt able to carry out a physical attack on the streets of London is a clear escalation.”

The former culture secretary says that Iran cannot be allowed to act with “impunity” and is among those arguing for the IRGC to be banned, alongside fellow Tory MP Bob Blackman.

“Journalists are constantly under threat, when all they are doing is reporting in a free and fair way on what is going on in Iran,” he says. “I don’t think we’ve done enough to protect them. We’ve got to be much more vigilant and much more interventionist on our streets.”

Reporters Without Borders described the police response to complaints by Persian-language journalists as “mixed”, with some victims told to increase security precautions themselves or even advised to “turn it down a little” to attract less attention.

In some cases, local police officers deployed to investigate incidents were unaware of the context of complaints, leading them to dismiss cases too quickly. In others, they could not understand or translate threats made in Persian.

The testimonies come amid anger over the treatment of an Iranian dissident who has been arrested several times for lodging anti-Hamas protests at pro-Palestinian London marches.

The Metropolitan Police said Niyak Ghorbani had failed to comply with legal conditions imposed to keep opposing factions from clashing on several occasions.

This week, Ghorbani was detained in Westminster for holding a sign saying “Hamas is terrorist”, but the force later admitted he “should not have been arrested”. Former minister Robert Jenrick accusing the Met of “two-tier policing”.