Embassy Siege. Shaun Clarke
regime, and in general ensured that Embassy business was conducted in a more modest, formal manner.
In the days of the Shah, the Embassy’s front door had been guarded by the British security company Securicor. Unfortunately, when Dr Afrouz took over, he dropped the company and gave the job to an Iranian, Abbas Fallahi, who had been the Embassy’s butler and knew precious little about security.
More knowledgeable in this area was Police Constable Trevor Lock, at that time a member of the Diplomatic Protection Group. This organization, being unable to give individual protection to each of London’s 138 embassies and High Commissions, was based at several strategic points in West London, remained constantly on alert in case of emergency, and also provided individual armed guards as part of the British Government’s token contribution to the embassies’ security.
Though not due to serve at the Iranian Embassy that morning, PC Lock agreed to stand in for a colleague who required the day off for personal matters. So it was that at approximately 1100 on 30 April, the policeman strapped his holstered standard-police issue .38 Smith and Wesson revolver to his thigh, carefully buttoned his tunic over the holster, then set out for the Embassy.
One of the most loyal members of the Embassy staff was not an Iranian, but an Englishman, Ron Morris, who had joined as an office boy twenty-five years before, when he was only fourteen. Ron had graduated to the position of chauffeur, then, when the luxuries of the Shah’s days were swept away, among them the ambassadorial Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, he was made a caretaker and general maintenance man.
Just before nine o’clock on the morning of 30 April, Ron bid a routine farewell to his Italian wife Maria and cat Gingerella, left his basement flat in Chester Street, Belgravia, and drove on his moped to the Embassy, arriving there on the dot of nine. After parking his moped against the railings, he entered the building and began work as usual.
Two hours later, Simeon ‘Sim’ Harris, a thirty-three-year-old sound recordist, and Chris Cramer, a thirty-one-year-old news organizer, both with the BBC and widely experienced in the world’s trouble spots, arrived at the Embassy to try yet again – they had tried and failed before – to obtain visas to visit Iran. They were met by the doorman, Abbas Fallahi, who led them to the reception room, located through the first door on the left in the entrance hall. While waiting there, they were joined by another visitor, Ali Tabatabai, an employee of Iran’s Bank Markazi. In London for a fourteen-week course for international bankers run by the Midland Bank, Ali was visiting the Embassy to collect a film and map of Iran for a talk he was to give as part of his course. He sat beside the two BBC men and, like them, waited patiently.
These three visitors were soon joined by Majtaba Mehrnavard, an elderly, nervous man who bought and sold Persian carpets, but was there because he was worried about his health and wished to consult the Embassy’s medical adviser, Ahmed Dagdar.
Ten minutes after the arrival of the BBC team, Mustafa Karkouti, a Syrian journalist who was the European correspondent for As-Afir, the leading Beirut newspaper, arrived to interview the Embassy’s cultural attaché, Dr Abul Fazi Ezzatti. Shown into Ezzatti’s office, Room 13 on the third floor, he was offered a cup of coffee and proceeded with his interview while drinking it.
Another newsman present was Muhammad Farughi, a fifty-year-old British national born in India. He was the editor of Impact International, a Muslim magazine based in Finsbury Park, north London. Farughi had come to the Embassy for an interview with the chargé d’affaires, Dr Ali Afrouz, for an article about the Islamic revolution in Iran, and was at once escorted to the latter’s office, at the front of the building, on the first floor, overlooking Princes Gate.
On arriving at the Embassy for his day of duty on behalf of the Diplomatic Protection Group, PC Lock took up his usual position outside, by the steps leading up to the front door. On this particular morning, however, which was particularly cold, he was offered a warming cup of tea by the sympathetic doorman, Abbas Fallahi. As it would not have been proper to have been seen drinking outside the building, the frozen policeman decided to take his tea in the small ante-room between the outside door and the heavy security doors leading to the entrance hall. So he was not present outside – and, even worse, the main door was ajar – when the six armed men from Baghdad arrived at the doorstep.
Number 105 Lexham Gardens, Earls Court Road, was rather more modest than the Iranian Embassy. An end-of-terrace Victorian house with five steps leading up to the front door, it had simulated tiles on the steps and yellow awnings above the window to give the façade the appearance of a colourful Continental hotel. Inside, it was less grand. The foyer was papered with gold-flecked wallpaper, the carpet was blood-red, and an office desk served as reception.
Flat 3, on the second floor, contained three bedrooms, two sitting-rooms, two bathrooms and a kitchen. The rooms had the tired, slightly tatty appearance of all bedsits and flats in the city, with unmatching furniture, fading wallpaper, and a combination of bare floorboards and loose, well-worn carpets.
At 9.40 a.m. on Wednesday, 30 April 1980, the six Iranians who had shared the flat with another, Sami Muhammad Ali, left it one by one and gathered in the foyer. They were all wearing anoraks to keep out the cold and to conceal the weapons they would soon collect.
The leader of the group, Oan-Ali, real name Salim Towfigh, had a frizzy Afro hairstyle, a bushy beard and sideburns. Twenty-seven years old, he was the only member of the group to speak English. His second in command was twenty-one-year-old Shakir Abdullah Fadhil, also known as Jasim or Feisal, a so-called Ministry of Industry official who favoured jeans and cowboy boots and claimed to have once been tortured by SAVAK. The others were Fowzi Badavi Nejad, known as Ali, at nineteen the youngest and smallest member of the group; the short, heavily-built Shakir Sultan Said, or Shai, twenty-three and a former mechanic whose almost blond hair fell down over his ears; Makki Hounoun Ali, twenty-five, another Baghdad mechanic who now acted as the group’s humble housekeeper; and a slim young man named Ali Abdullah, known as Nejad.
Though not as obviously dominant as Oan, Ali Abdullah was greatly respected by the others because his older brother Fa’ad was one of the most important leaders of the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan. Fa’ad Abdullah operated in exile in Iraq and broadcast regularly for the Arabic and Farsi sections of Radio Baghdad, exhorting the Iranians to rise up against the regime of the Ayatollahs.
Ali was a serious young man. More ebullient was Makki, who informed one of the other residents that the group was heading for France. In the foyer, Ali informed the Egyptian caretaker, Ahmed, that their nine bags, weighing a total of 203lb, would be collected by David Arafat, the property agent who had rented them the flat through his Tehar Service Agency in Earls Court Road. It would then be airfreighted back to Baghdad by him. After depositing the bags with Ahmed, the group left the building.
Makki waved goodbye to those watching through the glass doors of the foyer, then blew a handful of kisses and followed the others along the pavement.
For the next hour and a half, in the steel-grey morning light, the group moved from one safe house to another, collecting an arsenal of weapons that included two deadly Skorpion W263 Polish sub-machine-guns, three Browning self-loading pistols, one .38 Astra revolver, five Soviet-made RGD5 hand-grenades, and enough ammunition for a lengthy siege. By eleven-twenty the six men were assembled in Hyde Park, near the Albert Memorial, their weapons hidden under their coats, engaged in a last-minute discussion of their plans. Just before eleven-thirty, they left the park, crossed the road, and arrived outside 16 Princes Gate. The front door of the Embassy was ajar.
After covering their faces with the loose flap of their keffias, the traditional patterned Arab headdress, so that only their eyes and noses were visible, the men removed their weapons and stormed through the open front door of the Embassy, into the entrance hall. Hearing the commotion at the outer door, PC Lock darted out of the small ante-room and was practically bowled over by the terrorists rushing in. The deafening roar of automatic fire close to his ear was followed by the sound of smashing glass. A large slice of flying glass from the inner-door panel slashed PC Lock’s cheek. Before he could remove his pistol, and as he was in the throes of sending an unfinished warning to Scotland Yard, one of the Arabs wrested the portable radio from him and another