Tehran, November 05: Iran has arrested four people it alleges were paid by a Kurdish militant based in Britain to carry out assassinations, state-run TV said on Thursday in a report that accused the UK of funding anti-Iranian “terrorists”.
The news coincided with the anniversary of the storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran after the 1979 revolution an event which has come to symbolise the Islamic Republic’s resistance to Western hostility to the Islamic Republic.
Thousands of people marched outside the former embassy building now known as the “Den of Espionage” and shouted “Death to America, England and Israel”.
A smaller demonstration was later held outside the British embassy where around 100 protesters called for the mission to close. They threw tomatoes and eggs and burned a British flag, the official IRNA news agency reported.
The protest was against remarks by Britain’s spy chief who said “intelligence-led operations” were needed to prevent Iran getting a nuclear bomb, a comment interpreted as proof that Britain was using subterfuge against the government.
The British Foreign Office rejected Press TV’s assertion that, according to Iran’s Intelligence Ministry, it “funded and supported certain terrorist groups against the Islamic Republic”.
“There is a long history of baseless Iranian allegations against the UK. This is just the latest,” a spokesman said.
“The UK does not support or encourage terrorist activity in Iran, or anywhere else in the world, and this claim will be seen as what it is: another in a long line of slurs against the United Kingdom from the government of Iran.”
Britain backed a U.S.-led push to tighten sanctions against Iran over the nuclear activities it fears are aimed at making an atomic bomb, something Iran denies.
Iran accused foreign powers of fomenting the anti-government demonstrations which followed the re-election of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2009, which the opposition said was rigged. The authorities put down the “sedition” with sometimes brutal repression.
Thursday’s news report, on Iran’s English language TV channel, said the arrested militants were paid by a commander of Komala, an Iranian Kurdish group it described as a “terrorist” organisation, to carry out five assassinations in the last two years.
The men were all members of Komala and received weapons and cash on the Iran-Iraq border, it said. It did not say who were their victims.
Kurds are an ethnic group with no state of their own who make up large minorities in Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. Iranian forces sometimes clash with Kurdish guerrillas who operate out of bases in northern Iraq.
In a rare positive signal towards Washington, Iran welcomed a U.S. decision to classify as terrorists the Iranian Sunni Muslim rebel group Jundollah, whose leader, Abdolmalek Rigi was executed in June.
“Iran regards the registration of the Rigi terrorist group in the U.S. national terrorist group list a step in the right direction,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said, adding that Iran would “evaluate the change in U.S. policy by its actions.”
Iran says Jundollah has links to al Qaeda. The group, which says it is fighting for the rights of the Baluch people facing “genocide” in southeastern Iran, claimed a double suicide attack at a mosque in July which killed 28 people.
-Agencies