Embassy attack due to rage against Britain, trio claim

The storming of the British embassy in Tehran last month was not a planned attack but the result of an explosion of anger at UK meddling in Iranian affairs, a group that claimed responsibility for the incident has declared.

Three men who looked to be in their 20s yesterday gave a news conference and said they were among the attackers of the British embassy compounds in Tehran on 29 November. They expressed no remorse over their acts, which have increased Iran’s international isolation.

Mostafa Mostajeran, one of the representatives of the so-called “British spy nest pickets’ council”, said the intention had been to protest in front of the British mission and stage a “mock arrest” of the ambassador.

“There had been no prior planning made to enter the embassy,” he said. “But the rage people felt towards Britain led to the loss of control and resulted in the entry into the embassy.”

The incident came after Britain announced new sanctions aimed at forcing Tehran to halt its nuclear activities. The European Union and United States are discussing further sanctions that could hit Iran’s vital oil exports.

Britain closed its embassy and evacuated all its staff after the attack, which it said could not have taken place without some degree of consent from the Iranian authorities. It hit back by shutting Iran’s embassy in London and expelling the staff.

The incident brought Iran’s relations with Europe to a new low, with France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands withdrawing ambassadors temporarily.

Witnesses said the British embassy buildings had been devastated. Valuable paintings were slashed, personal belongings destroyed and offices set on fire.

Foreign Secretary William Hague said the raids had been carried out by Basij militia, a voluntary force controlled by Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard.

The men at the news conference yesterday did not confirm or deny they were Basij members. “Don’t refer to us as Basijis today … What happened was merely a slap by revolutionary students,” one of them, Mohammad Javad Nikravesh, said.

He accused “British stooges” of inflicting some of the damage to harm Iran’s image.

Mr Nikravesh was seated next to a photograph of Majid Shahriyari, an Iranian nuclear scientist killed a year ago in a bomb attack that Iran blames on Israel and its western allies. Mr Nikravesh said the protesters had found “espionage and sedition documents” on the British premises they would pass on to Iranian intelligence.

Tension has been growing over Iran’s nuclear programme, which Tehran says is purely for peaceful purposes but which Western countries suspect is aimed at building an atomic bomb. Tehran has warned it would retaliate against a military strike in a way that would hurt US troops in the region and disrupt the global economy.

The Iranian media has in recent days been gleefully parading a US spy drone that crash-landed in the country during a surveillance mission. State TV reported yesterday that Iranian experts are in the final stages of recovering data from it.