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Continued Morris: "I put up my hands and shouted, Tm British, I'm British!' I was grabbed by an S.A.S. man, who hurled me through the door. Had he arrived literally two seconds later, I would not be here to tell this story."
As flames broke out, Hostage Simeon Harris, 33, a British Broadcasting Corp. technician, ran onto the front balcony and waved, but a commando outside the window shouted to him, "Get down, get down!" When Harris replied, "I'm going to burn to death," another commando ordered, "Come here, come here," and helped the technician to the adjoining town house. Said Harris, who re-entered the embassy through another room: "They didn't lead us out, they threw us out, tossing us from one commando to another in a chain." The S.A.S. also took the precaution of tying the hostages' hands while checking their identities. Four of the terrorists were killed in the attack, and a fifth died on the way to the nearest hospital. The sixth, a Khuzistan dockworker named Fowzi Badavi Nejad, 23, tried to hide among the hostages but was quickly identified and taken into custody. The next day he was charged with taking part in the shooting of Lavasani and another Iranian hostage whose body was later found in the wreckage of the embassy.
Speaking to a jubilant House of Commons, Mrs. Thatcher expressed the hope that "the way this operation was carried out will have an effect on the future position of American hostages in Iran." She noted pointedly, in reply to a message from Iranian President Abolhassan Banisadr, that it was the responsibility of "each and every government to look after the safety of diplomats on their territory."
A5 expected, the authorities in Tehran remained unmoved. Khomeini, who had previously blamed the London embassy seizure on the CIA, said nothing at all. Banisadr, who had been willing to accept "the martyrdom of our children in England," now declared merely that "the brave resistance of our children" had brought "its sweet fruit." Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh insisted, as before, that the London incident was a "terrorist act," while the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran was "a legitimate outcry against 25 years of oppression." Even more bluntly, one of the Revolutionary Council's leading zealots, Ayatullah Seyyed Mohammed Beheshti, told a journalist who asked if the London incident could lead to a settlement of the Tehran crisis: "If you think that, it is your first mistake."
Thus the plight of the American hostages, who have now been moved from the Tehran embassy to some twelve locations throughout Iran, remained the same. In a flurry of witch hunting last week, the Tehran authorities interrogated several Western journalists and detained an American freelance writer, Cynthia Dwyer of Buffalo, as a "CIA spy." As for the hostages, their fate will be settled by the newly elected parliament, due to meet sometime in June, in the Iranians' own sweet time.