Iranian protesters early yesterday stormed the Saudi Arabian embassy in Tehran and Shiite Muslim Iran’s top leader predicted “divine vengeance” over Saudi Arabia’s execution of a prominent Shiite cleric.
Protesters against cleric Nimr al-Nimr’s execution broke into the embassy building, smashed furniture and started fires before being ejected by police.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani condemned the execution as “inhuman,” but also called for the prosecution of “extremist individuals” for attacking the embassy and the Saudi Arabian consulate in the northeastern city of Mashhad, state media reported.
Tehran’s police chief said an unspecified number of “unruly elements” were arrested for attacking the embassy with firebombs and rocks. A prosecutor said 40 people were held.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, criticizing Saudi Arabia for the second straight day over al-Nimr’s execution, said politicians in the kingdom would face divine retribution for his death.
“The unjustly spilled blood of this oppressed martyr will no doubt soon show its effect and divine vengeance will befall Saudi politicians,” state TV reported Khamenei as saying.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards promised “harsh revenge” against the Sunni Saudi royal dynasty for Saturday’s execution of al-Nimr, considered a terrorist by Riyadh, but hailed in Iran as a champion of the rights of Saudi Arabia’s marginalized Shiite minority.
Al-Nimr, the most vocal critic of the dynasty among the Shiite minority, had come to be seen as a leader of the sect’s younger activists, who had tired of the failure of older, more measured leaders to achieve equality with Sunnis.
Although most of the 47 men killed in the kingdom’s biggest mass execution in decades were Sunnis convicted of al-Qaeda attacks in Saudi Arabia a decade ago, it was al-Nimr and three other Shiites, all accused of involvement in police shootings, who attracted most attention in the region and beyond.
The move appeared to end any hopes that the appearance of a common enemy in the form of the Islamic State group would produce some rapprochement between the region’s leading Sunni and Shiite Muslim powers, allied to opposing sides in wars currently raging in Syria and Yemen.
Khamenei’s Web site carried a picture of a Saudi executioner next to notorious Islamic State executioner “Jihadi John,” with the caption: “Any differences?”
In Iraq, whose Shiite-led government is close to Iran, religious and political figures demanded that ties with Riyadh be severed, calling into question Saudi Arabian attempts to forge a regional alliance against the Islamic State.
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