Tehran: Protesters throw firebombs at Danish Embassy
Police have used tear gas to disperse hundreds of angry protesters who hurled stones and fire bombs at the Danish Embassy in Tehran, in the second attack on a Western embassy in the Iranian capital today over the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.
Police had encircled the embassy building but were unable to hold back the estimated 400 demonstrators as they pelted the walled brick villa housing the Danish mission with stones and Molotov cocktails.
At least nine demonstrators were hurt in the melee, police said.
About an hour into the demonstration, police fired tear gas into the mob, which ran into a nearby park.
Two trees inside the embassy compound were set on fire by the petrol bombs. The embassy gate was burned as was a police booth along the wall protecting the building. Demonstrators burned a Danish flag and chanted: “God is great.”
The crowd had not, however, managed to breach the police cordon and get inside the compound, which was believed to have been evacuated earlier.
The mob, which included about 100 women, had ignored police orders to disperse continued to hurl firebombs, before they were hit with tear gas.
Earlier in the day, 200 student demonstrators threw stones at the Austrian Embassy, breaking some windows and starting small fires.
Also today, 200 members of Iran’s parliament issued a statement warning that those who published the cartoons should remember the case of Salman Rushdie - the British author against whom the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a death warrant for his novel The Satanic Verses.
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