Iran’s ultra-Islamists burn French flags outside embassy

Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Aug. 23 – Several hundred radical Islamists from the para-military Bassij force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards set fire to French flags outside the embassy of France in Tehran on Tuesday, amid chants of “Death to France”. The militants, who described themselves as “members of student organisation of Bassij”, later demonstrated outside the embassies of Britain and Germany, France’s two other European partners in the two-year talks with the Islamic Republic on Iran’s nuclear activities. Iran Focus

Tehran, Iran, Aug. 23 – Several hundred radical Islamists from the para-military Bassij force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards set fire to French flags outside the embassy of France in Tehran on Tuesday, amid chants of “Death to France”.

The militants, who described themselves as “members of student organisation of Bassij”, later demonstrated outside the embassies of Britain and Germany, France’s two other European partners in the two-year talks with the Islamic Republic on Iran’s nuclear activities.

“Shut down the French embassy”, shouted the Islamist radicals. This is the first time in recent years that an organisation affiliated to a state agency holds a protest demonstration outside the French embassy and burns French flags. Iran’s clerical leaders have been praising the French government’s positions on the Middle East in recent years.

Demonstrators laid down a pair of French flags across the street so as to be soiled by passing vehicles and pedestrians.

Relations between Paris and Tehran have been affected by the dispute over Iran’s controversial nuclear program and the defiant stance of the new government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A French Foreign Ministry spokesperson on Tuesday announced that talks on a formal European proposal made earlier this month would not now go ahead because Iran had resumed certain nuclear work in breach of a promise to freeze it while talks lasted, Reuters news agency reported.

The Islamist demonstrator later burnt British and American flags outside the embassies of Germany and the United Kingdom.

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