Embassy blast may have been suicide attack

A pick-up truck crashed into the wall of the British Embassy in the Iranian capital Tehran tonight, immediately exploding in flames, in what one witness said appeared to be a suicide attack.

Police Colonel Ali Ahmadi said the crash appeared to be an accident in which the truck driver was killed. But the witness said the careful driving of the vehicle made the collision seem deliberate.

The pick-up truck left the main road and went through openings in metal barriers on either side of a bus lane that passes in front of the embassy wall.

It hit the wall, a yard away from the main gate, and exploded at 22:15 local time (6.45pm Irish time).

“As I heard a huge explosion, I turned back and saw a big ball of fire,” Ali Sajjadi, a teenager onlooker said.

The heavily burned body of the driver could be seen.

Sajjadi said that if the truck had left the road accidentally, it “should have crashed into the metal barriers.”

That the pick-up truck got as far as the embassy wall ”makes it look like a suicide attack,” Sajjadi said.

In London, a Foreign Office spokesman said: ”It’s not clear if it was attack or an accident.”

A Downing Street spokeswoman said: “Somebody drove a vehicle at the British Embassy in Tehran and whatever it was exploded and the driver was killed. Nobody in the embassy compound was injured.”

In Tehran, the police cordoned off the area around the embassy. They asked everyone, including journalists, to leave the scene.

An hour after the crash, a crane removed the wreckage of the burned-out truck.

The embassy was the scene of a large anti-war demonstration on Friday. During the protest, demonstrators threw stones that broke some embassy windows and police fired shots into the air to disperse the crowd.

On Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi phoned his British counterpart Jack Straw and warned that the war was engendering hostility toward the allied forces, and to urge them to protect the holy sites in Iraq, Iranian state radio has reported.

Kharazzi said the increasing bloodshed was “a human tragedy that will provoke great hatred by Islamic nations of the foreign occupiers in Iraq,” Kharazzi told Straw, according to Tehran radio.