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"At 11:30 on 30 April 1980 a six-man terrorist team calling itself the "Democratic Revolutionary Movement for the Liberation of Arabistan" (DRMLA), sponsored by Saddam Hussein's Iraq, captured the building in Prince's Gate, Knightsbridge, central London.


Initially it emerged they wanted autonomy for an oil-rich region in southern Iran known as Khuzestan; later they demanded the release of 91 of their comrades held in Ayatollah Khomeini's jails. Only after the incident was over did it emerge that Iraq had trained and armed the gunmen to embarrass Iran, and it would become a prelude to the Iran-Iraq war.



Initially 26 hostages were taken, but five were released over the following few days. Police negotiators attempted to mollify the terrorists with supplies of food and cigarettes and on the third day a statement by the terrorists was broadcast on the BBC following threats to kill a hostage. The terrorist unit's Iraqi handler had promised the group that the Jordanian Ambassador would intervene to provide safe passage but when it became clear this was not going to happen the situation in the Embassy deteriorated.



On the sixth day of the siege the terrorists killed a hostage, the embassy's press attache Abbas Lavasani, and threw his body outside. This marked a crucial escalation of the situation and prompted Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's decision to go ahead with the operation. The order to deploy the Special Air Service (SAS) who had been trained for counter-terrorism was given in the first few hours of the siege. When the first hostage was shot, a note from the Metropolitan Police Commissioner was passed to the Ministry of Defence stating this was now a military operation.



The previously reclusive SAS thus found itself conducting a sharp, violent attack under the glare of the world's television cameras."



(Wikipedia)


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