Abbas Yazdi and his wife Atena Yazdi.

DUBAI — A court in the United Arab Emirates sentenced six Iranians, three of them in absentia, to life in prison for kidnapping a British businessman who went missing in Dubai in 2013, newspapers reported on Thursday.

Abbas Yazdi, a businessman of Iranian descent who owns a general trading company in Dubai, disappeared in June 2013 and his wife, Atena, told a UAE newspaper at the time that she feared he may have been kidnapped by Iranian intelligence officers.

Iran has denied any role in Yazdi’s disappearance.

Prosecutors in Dubai said the defendants attacked and drugged Yazdi and smuggled him out of the country to Iran through a port in the UAE emirate of Sharjah.

Gulf News reported that the defendants denied the charges of kidnapping, assault and theft, although one of them admitted he had driven the car used in the abduction.

UAE newspaper Seven Days has cited Yazdi’s wife as saying the trader and investor, 44 at the time of his disappearance, was a close childhood friend of the son of former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

British media had reported that, at the time of his disappearance, Yazdi was giving evidence by video link to an international arbitration tribunal in The Hague intended to settle a long-running commercial dispute involving UAE-based Crescent Petroleum and the National Iranian Oil Company.