The six-day siege that put terror on television

IN APRIL 1980 gunmen stormed the Iranian embassy in London and took 26 hostages. The assailants were not Islamist fanatics. Nor was this in retaliation for the then-ongoing seizure of America’s embassy in Tehran by the nascent Islamic Republic of Iran, which had taken power the previous year. Instead this was the work of a militant group, the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan, hoping to secure a homeland for Iranian Arabs in the oil-rich province of Khuzestan. Less than a week later their ambitions were crushed when Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS), an elite group of soldiers (pictured), charged into the embassy.