An Iranian Foreign Ministry official told British charge d’affaires Jane Marriott that charges levelled by Foreign Secretary William Hague were “without any evidence or reason”, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Hague told parliament this week that Tehran, an ally of Syria’s in its support for anti-Israel militant groups Hamas and Hizbollah, had been helping to suppress protests where rights groups say hundreds of Syrians may have been killed.

“Iran is combining brutal suppression of opposition leaders at home with the provision of equipment and technical advice to help the Syrian regime crush protests in Syria,” Hague said.

“This is unacceptable, and compounds our concern about Iran’s behaviour and its intentions over its nuclear programme.”

The top UN human rights official said today that more than 1,100 people may have been killed and up to 10,000 detained in the Syrian unrest since March, and that the government of President Bashar al-Assad was conducting an “assault on its own people”.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry said: “There is no justification for the British government to raise such charges against other countries because of its own meddlesome measures and destructive role in developments in the region, especially the training of military forces in some countries in order to suppress the people.”

Iran, which crushed its own anti-government protests after the contested re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, has voiced support for demonstrations in most of the Arab world, but not Syria, and has strongly condemned military deployment by Saudi Arabia to quell unrest inBahrain.

Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are both allied to the West. — Reuters