AFP: Crowds of people hurled eggs and tomatoes at the British embassy in Tehran on Thursday after the MI6 spy chief said espionage was key to curbing Iran’s nuclear drive, state news agency IRNA reported.
TEHRAN, November 4, 2010 (AFP) – Crowds of people hurled eggs and tomatoes at the British embassy in Tehran on Thursday after the MI6 spy chief said espionage was key to curbing Iran’s nuclear drive, state news agency IRNA reported.
IRNA said about 100 Iranians gathered outside Britain’s mission and chanted “Death to America!” and “Death to Britain!” as they threw the projectiles at the building.
They were protesting against remarks made on Friday by John Sawers, the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6, that espionage was responsible for Iran’s admission last year of a second enrichment plant, which in turn led to tougher diplomatic pressure.
“Stopping nuclear proliferation cannot be addressed purely by conventional diplomacy. We need intelligence-led operations to make it more difficult for countries like Iran to develop nuclear weapons,” Sawers said.
The UN Security Council has imposed four sets of sanctions against Iran over its nuclear activities, which the West fears mask a weapons drive, a charge the Islamic republic vehemently denies.
In September 2009, Iran notified the UN nuclear watchdog it was building a second uranium enrichment plant near the central holy city of Qom.
World powers are particularly concerned about Iran’s uranium enrichment programme, as the refined material can be used to make the fissile core of an atom bomb, as well as power a nuclear reactor.
In a separate mass protest, thousands of Iranians demonstrated on Thursday outside the closed US embassy in central Tehran to mark the 31st anniversary of the capturing of the mission by radical Islamist students in 1979.
