UK defence secretary calls on Iranian regime to release of Australians

A brief statement from Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade came after the British newspaper the Times reported that two British-Australian women and the Australian boyfriend of one of them had been jailed in Iran.

The Times said a blogger who had been travelling in Asia with her Australian boyfriend, as well as an academic who had studied at Cambridge University and was lecturing at a university in Australia had been detained in separate incidents.

They are being held in the same prison in Tehran where a British-Iranian aid worker, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, has been jailed since 2016 on spying charges, the Times said.

The detentions have come amid a growing standoff between Western powers and Tehran after the United States withdrew from a deal that imposed curbs on Iranian regime's nuclear programme and then imposed sanctions on it, aiming to halt its oil exports.