A senior Iranian Member of Parliament has accused Israel of abducting five Iranian engineers in Syria last month and asked Damascus to free them, Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency reported Monday.

The charges were made as the Arab League is split over whether to authorize military intervention in Syria. Iran, one of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s few remaining allies, has said that it would send its Revolutionary Guards to help Assad. The Guards reportedly have been cooperating in Syria to help suppress the 10-month protest movement. Syrian forces have murdered, wounded and kidnapped thousands of civilians, using tactics similar to those used by the Guards in quelling the anti- Ahmadinejad rallies nearly three years ago.

MP Seyed Hossein Hosseini said that the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, on which he is a member, “is fully aware that the abduction has been done on the basis of a plot hatched by the Quds Occupying Regime.”

He charged that the Iranian “engineers” were abducted after the ”Zionist regime started exercising its plots for creating tension in Syria,” in the usual language by Iranian news agencies that usually avoids the term “Israel.”

“The group of engineers was abducted on December 20 en route to the 450-MW power plant they were involved in building in Homs at 6:30 a.m. local time,” Fars reported.