TEHRAN, July 4: Iran pledged on Sunday that the three boats seized during the arrest of eight British servicemen alleged to have entered Iranian waters would be returned, despite a spat over the circumstances of last month's incident.

"This is not an important problem, we are going through the procedures so the boats and equipment will go back to the British," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters.

The boats and equipment are central to the current dispute, given that Britain maintains the six Royal Marines and two sailors had been "forcibly escorted" over the maritime border by Iran's hardline Revolutionary Guards.

The team, however, had been paraded with blindfolds on television and forced to publicly apologize for what they called a "mistake" in navigation before being released after three days in captivity.

Britain says the sophisticated GPS navigational equipment had recorded their movements along the sensitive Shatt al-Arab waterway, which demarcates Iran's border with British-occupied southern Iraq. -AFP