TEHRAN, June 22: Iran hinted on Tuesday it could soon release eight heavily-armed members of Britain's Royal Navy who strayed into Iranian waters on the border with Iraq, easing fears the incident could spiral into a crisis.

A member of the general staff of Iran's armed forces, Ali Reza Afshar, said interrogators were trying to establish what the sailors and Royal Marines were doing on Iran's side of the strategic and highly sensitive Shatt al-Arab waterway that demarcates the southern border between Iran and Iraq.

"If the results of the interrogation of the British soldiers show that they did not have bad intentions, they will be freed very soon," Afshar told the student news agency ISNA.

Iranian state television, which has angered British officials by broadcasting video footage of the group being held blindfolded in a cramped room, also quoted a military source as saying their release - without the trial that had been threatened earlier - was now "probable".

And after Iran appeared to reject appeals from Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw for their speedy release, Iran's defence minister also urged conciliation. "The issue of the British boats is solvable," Rear Admiral Ali Shamkhani said.

"Those wrongdoers who do not have a hostile attitude should be dealt with in a way that corresponds with Iranian dignity." In London, the Foreign Office called for the eight naval personnel to be released "as soon as possible" and summoned Tehran's ambassador to London, Morteza Sarmadi, over the incident, which comes amid a fresh downturn in relations between Tehran and London.

But British diplomats in Tehran, meanwhile, continued to be frustrated in their efforts to gain consular access to the detained men, arrested by Iran's Revolutionary Guards on Monday.

Iran's Arabic-language satellite channel Al-Alam, a branch of its state television network, said the Britons had "confessed" to having strayed into the Iranian side of the Shatt, where the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the Gulf.

Al-Alam, granted access to the prisoners, identified the two officers in the group as Robert Webster and Thomas Higgins. Webster told the channel that the team, en route from the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr to the main southern city of Basra, had made a "navigational fault".

Having earlier shown the eight sitting comfortably on sofas, the channel then broadcast video of them sitting on the floor in a small room blindfolded. Their hands and feet were not bound. They were dressed in military fatigues and appeared to be unhappy but unharmed.

The channel also showed images of captured equipment, including a vast array of weapons, communications equipment, GPS navigational devices, night-vision goggles, cameras and the flag of the Royal Marines Commando Brigade.

"With this equipment they were carrying they could not have lost their way," an Iranian military source was also quoted as saying in a day of mixed messages from the Iranians. "They could not have just been on a simple patrol."

Britain says the team combined Royal Marines and Royal Navy training personnel - involved in training Iraqis to patrol the Shatt al-Arab - had merely been bringing a repaired boat from Umm Qasr to Basra when they were detained.

"We have no idea why they were taken at this particular point in time," said Squadron Leader Spike Wilson, a spokesman for the British forces who control southern Iraq from their headquarters in Basra. "The Iranians are claiming that we went over their international boundary. That's not something that's unusual, to be perfectly honest," Wilson said. -AFP