PICK-UP TRUCK CRASHES INTO BRITISH EMBASSY IN TEHRAN
TEHRAN 31 Mar. (IPS) A pick-up truck smashed into the wall of the British embassy compound in Tehran, on Monday, killing the driver, but causing no casualty to the embassy’s staff, the independent Iranian Students News Agency ISNA reported.
Iran's student news agency ISNA said the vehicle hit the compound wall close
to the embassy's main gates at around 10:15 p.m. and burst into flames.
"I doubt that this was a deliberate attack", government spokesman Abdollah Ramazanzadeh told the British news agency Reuters.
Police cordoned off the street in front of the diplomatic mission and refused to answer questions from an ISNA correspondent, the agency said
A Reuters photographer at the scene said he could see a crane removing the truck's wreckage.
On Friday, more than a dozen windows on the embassy's main office building were smashed by stone throwers as a crowd of about 300 anti-war protesters chanted slogans against the U.S.-led war in neighbouring Iraq and called for the British embassy to be closed down.
Eyewitnesses on the scene said though it seemed that the truck was carrying explosives, but there was no explosion when it crushed on the wall of the embassy, which is heavily guarded.
The British embassy bore the brunt of anger against the war in Iraq because there has been no U.S. diplomatic presence in Iran since shortly after the 1979 Islamic revolution when radical students stormed the U.S. embassy and held 52 hostages for 444 days.
In a statement published Saturday, Grand Ayatollah Hoseynali Montazeri urged on the Muslim people world-wide not to co-operate with the American war against Iraq, but at the same time he called on the international community to try the Iraqi dictator in an international court for crimes against humanity
Despite official opposition to the U.S.-led attack on Iraq anti-war sentiment has been fairly muted in Iran, as Iranians have little sympathy for Iraqi President who attacked Iran in 1980 and used chemical weapons against Iranian troops. ENDS TRUCK CRASH AT UK EMBASSY 31303