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U.K.: Iran faces ‘serious consequences’ over embassy attacks – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

Foreign Minister William Hague says Iranian government failed to take measures to protect two British embassies attacked by protesters.

By Reuters

Iran faces “serious consequences” after protesters stormed two British diplomatic compounds in Tehran, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Tuesday, adding that he had protested in the “strongest terms” to Iran’s foreign minister.

 

“We hold the Iranian government responsible for its failure to take adequate measures to protect our embassy, as it is required to do,” Hague said in a statement. “Clearly there will be other, further, and serious consequences.”

 

	Iranian protesters stand on the gate of the British Embassy, holding a satirized British flag and Islamic flags, in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2011.
	Photo by: AP

 

Hague said all embassy staff and their dependants had been accounted for. Earlier reports said six British embassy staff were briefly held hostage during the incident.

 

Iranian protesters smashed windows, hurled petrol bombs and burned the British flag during a rally to protest against sanctions imposed by Britain, live Iranian television showed.

 

The attacks followed the rapid approval by Iran’s Guardian Council of a parliamentary bill compelling the government to expel the British ambassador in retaliation for the sanctions, and warnings from a lawmaker that angry Iranians could storm the British embassy as they did to the U.S. mission in 1979.

 

Demonstrators waved flags symbolizing martyrdom and held up portraits of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

 

A separate group of protesters broke into a second British embassy compound in the north of the city, the IRNA state news agency said, and seized “classified documents”.

 

Riot police later moved in and mounted the embassy gates, helping protesters climb back on the street outside, television pictures showed, and began to slowly clear demonstrators.

 

The incident followed Britain’s imposition of new sanctions on the Islamic state last week over its nuclear program.

London banned all British financial institutions from doing business with their Iranian counterparts, including the Central Bank of Iran, as part of a new wave of sanctions by Western countries.

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