Iran’s outspoken bloggers are deeply critical of the way that Tehran is handling the crisis over the captured Britons.

The views expressed by many online diarists are in stark contrast to those of hardline students shown protesting violently outside the British Embassy and baying for the British “aggressors” to be executed for spying.

“I cannot believe these guys in the Iranian administration! What are they trying to achieve keeping these guys?” wrote “Mr Behi”, a popular 29-year-old blogger who usually writes about cosy, domestic issues and his life as a happily married man in Tehran.

Like many bloggers writing from inside Iran, he uses an assumed name for his own safety. “Iran is afraid. It is cornered politically and militarily,” he wrote, suspecting that the decision to capture the Britons was a “panic reaction”.

Mr Behi (http://mrbehi.blogs.com) informed the West: “This [Iranian] administration is not very rational. Don’t poke it like this.”

He also urged his own Government not to goad the British and American forces in neighbouring Iraq and the region.

“These guys who are surrounding us are not that rational either. Do not poke them like this,” he wrote.

Iranian bloggers are among the world’s most prolific. The online diary became an alternative form of expression after Iran’s hardliners silenced scores of reformist newspapers.

The capture of the Britons proved “Iran does not care about its public image and does not know how to gain the support of the international community”, wrote another Tehran blogger (http://view-fromiran.blogspot.com).

“Iran is speaking with too many voices and has too many different agendas. Iran will come out of this the big loser.”

The parading of the British captives on Iranian television was dismissed by “Under Underground” as “an old trick that no more anybody in Iran is fooled by” (http://yaserb.blogspot.com ).

This view was taken further by Mehrangiz Kar, a respected Iranian human rights activist and lawyer who has moved to the United States after being jailed for two months in Iran for attending a conference about her country in Berlin.

She argued that Iran was doing little to defend its national security by exploiting Faye Turney, the sole woman among the 15 Britons.

“Rather than displaying her on national television with an imposed headscarf, they should have immediately released the captured woman sailor, with the commentary that in Islam a mother is truly respected,” Ms Kar wrote on the liberal news website Rooz (http://roozonline.com).

Iran analysts believe that President Ahmadinejad is relishing the crisis because it deflects attention from his political setbacks at home and criticism that he has failed to make good pledges of a better lot for Iran’s poor.

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