Protestors hurl stones at Iran's embassy in Netherlands

By Abdullah Asiran

THE HAGUE (AA) - A group demonstrating against the murders of two Iranian dissidents in the Netherlands attacked the Iranian embassy in The Hague late Wednesday and were arrested for public disorder, Dutch media reported.

The protest reportedly started out peacefully but later turned violent.

Some of the protesters reportedly hurled stones and objects at the embassy and tried to enter the building by climbing over its fence.

Police arrested four suspects, including the son of Ahmad Mola Nissi, a leader of the separatist group Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz (ASMLA), which is regarded as a terrorist organization by Tehran.

Nissi, 52, was shot dead at the front door of his residence in The Hague in November 2017.

The other dissident, Ali Motamed, was killed in a similar fashion outside his Amsterdam home in December 2015. Iran says he is responsible for a bomb attack in Tehran in 1981 that killed more than 70 people.

The demonstration comes after the Dutch government on Tuesday accused Iran of hiring criminal gangs to murder the two men and after the European Union imposed sanctions on Tehran for what it claimed was “a widespread campaign of assassination plots across Europe”.

The ASMLA -- an Arab nationalist insurgent group -- aims to establish a separate state in Iran's oil-rich southwestern province of Khuzestan.