The final chapter of the SAS Iranian Embassy siege

The Arab terrorists who almost a week ago had taken over the Iranian Embassy were on the run. Their leader was dead, riddled with bullets. Inside the blacked-out building, now in flames and awash with CS gas, the remaining five were being hunted down as the SAS operation reached its dramatic conclusion.

On the second floor, 22-year-old Shaye al-Sahar burst into the Telex Room, chased by SAS Lance-Corporal Tommy Palmer. The terrorist was standing in the centre of the room, holding in his hand what Palmer thought was a grenade and 'moving as if to detonate it'. From three yards, the soldier fired a single pistol round. The bullet entered Shaye's skull beneath the left ear and emerged from the right temple.

Palmer leant over to check he was dead, and then took in the scene around him. One hostage – embassy press assistant Ali Samadzadeh – lay dead under a desk. Another was badly wounded, his jersey soaked with blood, though still alive. Everyone was screaming.

'Are there any terrorists in here?' yelled Palmer. 'British! British! British' shouted hostage Ron Morris, the embassy's maintenance man. 'I am British.' Palmer pushed him down to the floor.

Terrified he might be mistaken for a gunman, Dr Ali Afrouz, the Iranian charge d'affaires, was waving his official pass in the air and calling out: 'Diplomat! Diplomat!' Palmer pointed his gun at him and again demanded: 'Which are the terrorists?'

Afrouz pointed to two men backed up against the wall, gunmen Jassim al-Nasiri and Makki Hanoun. 'Students! Students!' they shouted.

Meanwhile, cowering on the balcony, BBC sound engineer Sim Harris, another of the hostages, was in trouble. The window frame above him was burning fiercely, with fragments of flaming wood dropping on to him and sparks scorching the back of his neck.

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He was spotted by Lance-Corporal John McAleese on a neighbouring balcony, who shouted: 'Come over here, mate!' beckoning with a gloved hand. Harris put one foot up on the balustrade, pushed himself off and leapt. McAleese caught him and dragged him inside. Harris scrambled over a desk and bolted out on to the first-floor landing.

Back in the Telex Room, Staff Sergeant Tom Morell, second-in-command of the SAS unit, was challenging the two men huddled against the wall, almost hidden behind the door. 'Who are you?' he barked. 'Students!' they said in unison again, getting unsteadily to their feet. Morell did not believe them. Seizing the taller man, Jassim, by the collar of his green combat jacket, Morell threw him out of the door, shouting 'Terrorist!' In the noise and confusion, no one heard him.

At the same time, Trooper Paul Sanford tackled the other man, Makki, wrestling him to the ground. 'Search him,' ordered Morell before radioing Sunray, the operation commander: 'Room cleared, Yankee down, Yankee injured, one X-ray dead [hostage down, hostage injured, one terrorist dead].'

And now, as smoke and gas billowed from below in a thick fug, the evacuation was fully under way, troopers forming a line down the stairs and along the landings to pass the hostages out, tossing them downstairs, 'like rugby balls'. It was as if the whole embassy was one moving mass, the six women in the front, some barefoot, faces shocked and eyes streaming.

Sim Harris recalled being pulled into the human chain. 'They threw us down the stairs, from one man to the next, shouting 'Keep moving, get out, get out!' Everyone retched and coughed, tripping and stumbling in the half-darkness as they fell from one set of arms to another, tumbling down the stairs through the black smoke and then on, crunching through broken glass, to the back door.'

Even the wounded, like embassy doorman Abbas Fallahi, were unceremoniously bundled down. Harris saw the switchboard operator, Shirazeh Boroumand, 'wrenched from one soldier to another, screaming with pain as her neck was pulled out of joint'.

Harris was among the first into the daylight. 'We were thrown out of the building at the back and down some steps on to a lawn, where we were pushed face first on to the floor and really roughly tied up with plastic tie straps.'

Most of the men tipping them over were members of the Feltham Police Wrestling Team, brought in specially for their expertise at flipping people on their faces.

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Ron Morris did not even see his assailant coming before he was upended. 'My hands were grabbed, pulled behind me, and then a plastic strap was placed around my wrists and pulled tight.'

He lay with his face in the grass, inhaling the warm scent of the earth, but not for long.

Someone grabbed his hair and yanked up his head. 'Oh, you're Morris,' said a voice from behind a gas mask. 'How the hell do you know that?'

'We know everybody in here,' said the voice. 'We've been studying your photographs for a week. You feeling all right, Ron?' 'Yes, thanks very much,' said Morris as his face was dropped back into the sweet-smelling grass. 'Well,' he thought. 'So that's the end of that.'

Harris found secretary Nooshin Hashemenian hog-tied beside him, cheek to the grass. 'That was fantastic,' she said, through tears. Harris was crying too. 'I think we have just been rescued by one of the finest anti-terrorist squads in the world.' A man with a clipboard appeared, wearing jeans and a Levi's sweatshirt, accompanied by a Farsi interpreter. 'Any terrorists among this group?' he asked. 'No,' said secretary Roya Kaghachi – at just the moment, Fowzi Nejad, was brought downstairs among the four women.

At the command centre for Operation Nimrod, Brigadier Peter de la Billiere, Director SAS, kept Whitehall informed by shouting through the door of an annex to the Cabinet Office room, relaying each development in a single staccato bullet point. 'At least one hostage is dead.' 'The majority are alive.' 'The building is on fire.' 'Hostages are on the lawn.'

The situation remained confusing amid what De la Billiere called the 'cacophony of shouting and shots' coming from the embassy. Even after the hostages began to appear, it was not clear how many had survived. Some were injured.

But only two gunmen had been reported killed.

Which meant that four must still be inside.

As the liberated hostages continued to stream down the embassy staircase, Trooper Mel Parry ran back up it, accompanied by two men with torches mounted on machine guns – Trooper Ben Canon and Staff Sergeant Rob Timson. Trooper Denis Pringle knelt outside the door to the ambassador's office. 'There's a shot terrorist in there,' he said.

On Parry's signal, they burst in and fanned out in the darkness. The room swirled with smoke and gas and they inched forward, torch beams scanning from floor to eye level.

Timson heard a gentle rattle to the right and swung his torch towards the sound. Canon's light followed instantly. The beams crossed to find gunman Abbas Maytham on his back on the ambassador's velvet sofa, half lying, half sitting. He might almost have been resting or asleep. Bullets were tumbling from his jacket pocket, falling one by one, on to the floor. His left arm lay across his chest. His right arm was raised, clutching a pistol. Parry saw 'some movement with his hand' and all four men fired simultaneously, controlled bursts from around three yards. The post-mortem found 21 bullets in Abbas, including two direct to the heart.

Parry pulled open the shutters, flooding the room with evening sunlight, and the body of the gunman lay quite still. His weapon lay where he dropped it. Police investigators later found it was an air pistol, for shooting rats.

Abbas, a pockmarked youth nicknamed 'Ugly', died brandishing a harmless toy that belonged to Ron Morris, whose hobby was collecting replica guns. Abbas had pinched it and stuck it in his belt like a cowboy. A coroner would later conclude that the toy looked very much like a Browning semi-automatic pistol.

IT WAS now 7.30pm, just seven minutes since the SAS first entered the building, and in the Telex Room Trooper Sanford set about frisking Makki while Tom Morell stood over him, machine gun levelled and shouting 'Are you a terrorist?' in Arabic. Makki did not answer, and Sanford knelt by his head and repeated the question, this time in English.

'Lie still,' shouted Sanford, placing him in the 'letter 'T' position' with arms outstretched and beginning to pat him down, starting at the neck. He then parted Makki's legs, checking for a concealed weapon.

Morell immediately spotted, just below Makki's crotch, what he took to be the yellow holster of an automatic pistol. Sanford glimpsed the same object, which he identified as 'a magazine for an automatic pistol and a light-coloured magazine holster'.

At the same moment, Makki 'pulled his arms in towards his body as if to reach for something underneath his stomach'. Sanford's first thought was 'Grenade!' and he lurched backwards.

Morell also saw Makki move his hand and came to the same conclusion. 'I thought he was going for a weapon.' Morell emptied his machine gun, a burst of five rounds, into the small of Makki's back. 'Changing mag!' he shouted, as the wounded gunman rolled on to his right side and Sanford fired a second burst into his chest.

No gun or grenade was found near Makki's body, and nothing resembling a holster. An empty magazine lay nearby, probably discarded by one of the other gunmen. Investigators did, however, find a crushed yellow packet of biscuits, which, amid the swirling smoke and gas, the soldiers 'might have mistaken for some sort of holster', the coroner decided.

Trying to lose himself among the last group of hostages making their way down the stairs was a tall man with an Afro hairstyle and cowboy boots. Jassim had put up the collar of his green combat jacket to cover the lower part of his face. He avoided eye contact with every soldier who grabbed him and passed him along but it is very hard not to stand out when trying to be unobtrusive.

Several soldiers simultaneously identified him as a gunman.

Lance Corporal Tom MacDonald ­spotted his distinctive drooping moustache and yelled: 'That man is a terrorist.'

Trooper Mel Parry was passing the hostages along the chain, when he realised the man he had hold of was a possible terrorist. 'I immediately pushed him down the stairs to the soldier below me and shouted, 'Terrorist!' A voice yelled: 'He's got a grenade!'

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As Jassim passed him, Trooper Pete Winner swung the butt of his machine gun with maximum force into Jassim's head and sent him flying down into the hallway where he lay sprawled on the marble floor. 'Terrorist! Grenade!' someone shouted, and four men opened fire simultaneously, in a long, unbroken, deafening volley.

The grenade was lying on the fourth stair. The pin was still in it. A post-mortem found 39 bullet wounds. 'This man was really peppered,' said the coroner.

Every floor had been cleared, the last hostage removed, and yet a gun battle still seemed to be raging inside the building due to rounds exploding in the heat. The intensity of the fire had turned the central void into an inferno.

Word ran back up the line of troopers on the stairs. 'Everybody out. The building is burning.'

OUT on the embassy lawn, 15 people were laid out on the grass, coughing and gasping. The organiser with a clipboard moved from one prone hostage to the next until he came to a young, dark-haired man wearing light-coloured chinos and an anorak, lying among the four women. His wrists were securely cuffed, his face buried in the turf.

'What is your name?' the organiser asked. 'Student,' the young man croaked, eyes streaming. 'I am student.' But Sim Harris, lying on the grass, knew differently. He craned his neck round and shouted, 'That's Fowzi. He's one of the terrorists!'

The man with the clipboard ran over to Harris. 'Are you positive?' Harris: 'He's definitely one of them.'

By now, two SAS men in black were standing almost on top of the last surviving gunman. 'Is he a terrorist or hostage?' one of them shouted at the nearest woman.

'Don't hurt him!' screamed Shirazeh Boroumand, a secretary who had befriended Fowzi Nejad during the long nights of incarceration, an example of Stockholm Syndrome where hostages feel compassion for their captors. 'Don't hurt him. He's a nice boy.'

Two other women shuffled over on

their knees to surround Fowzi, forming a human shield.

'He's a terrorist,' Harris shouted again. Another SAS man screamed: 'Is he a terrorist or hostage?'

'Don't hurt him,' the woman sobbed. Roya Kaghachi, a senior secretary, joined in: 'Don't hurt him. He's my brother!'

Harris watched as the two SAS men seized Fowzi, 'ripping his bound hands from the girl's shoulder', and bodily lifted him off the ground. 'He was screaming with fright,' said Harris. Next to him, the girl was still sobbing.

What happened next is still a source of dispute. A witness, police photographer Alan Parker, who was snapping pictures from 30 yards away, claims to have overheard one of the SAS men say: 'Let's take the bastard back inside and shoot him.' Parker was in no doubt they were about to do just that when, he claims, one of the men looked up, saw they were being observed and said, 'We can't – he's been photographed by that bloke over there.'

Senior SAS officers at the scene emphatically reject this version of events, insisting the killing of a suspect, once disarmed and identified, could not and would not have been considered, let alone attempted.

Michael Rose, Commanding Officer of 22 SAS, claims that in the final briefing to the assault team, he had said 'it would be helpful if at least one terrorist wasn't killed because then we could interrogate them about what the whole thing had been about'.

No one else recalls the Commanding Officer saying this.

Lance-Corporal Tom MacDonald, by contrast, firmly believed that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wanted all the gunmen eliminated.

'The message was that we had to resolve the situation. The Prime Minister didn't want an ongoing problem beyond the embassy, which we took to mean that they didn't want anybody coming out alive. No surviving terrorists.'

That standpoint was supported by Lance-Corporal John McAleese: 'You're not going in there to take prisoners. You see them, you're going to shoot them.

'And if you shoot them, you better kill them. A wounded animal is always more dangerous than a dead one.'

Pete Winner, the trooper who had clubbed Jassim down the staircase, said it was 'law of the jungle. Kill or be killed'.

There is no conclusive evidence to support one or other of these diametrically opposed perspectives. But whether or not there was ever any desire, intention or attempt made by the SAS men to kill the last gunman, this much is certain: they did not do so.

Fowzi was seized by four SAS men and 'carted off', upside down, to be handed over to the police Special Patrol Group waiting nearby. He was driven to Paddington police station, handcuffed to two large policemen and accompanied by an Arabic interpreter. 'Will they kill me?' he asked her repeatedly. 'Are they going to hang me?'

At the Old Bailey, he would plead guilty to manslaughter and serve 27 years of a life sentence. He now lives in the UK.

Shortly after 7.30pm, Director SAS Peter de la Billiere entered the Cobra meeting room. 'Home Secretary,' he announced, 'I'm very pleased to tell you that the assault has been largely successful. Some soldiers have been injured but not seriously. One more hostage has been killed, and others may be hurt. But five of the terrorists are dead, and the sixth has been captured.' Everyone leapt up, shouting and laughing.

Home Secretary William Whitelaw rang Thatcher, who was pulling up outside the Cabinet Office in her car, and passed on the 'thrilling news' that 'the SAS operation had been a complete and dramatic success'.

Thatcher breathed a sigh of relief. A different outcome might have sunk her premiership before it was a year old, and she knew it. Whitelaw could sense from her tone of voice just how anxious she had been for the preceding half-hour.

Now whisky magically appeared from some bottom drawer. Glasses were filled, clinked and drained. Over at Princes Gate, four fire engines waiting a few streets away for the all-clear now screeched up to the embassy and torrents of water were soon pouring into the building, quickly bringing the blaze under control.

In the garden, the freed hostages were hauled to their feet and escorted to ambulances. After a final check by the man with the clipboard, their plasticuffs were removed, and the convoy set off, sirens screeching, for St Stephen's Hospital, where hostage Ahmad Dadgar was already undergoing emergency surgery for multiple gunshot wounds.

As they were being unloaded outside the hospital, Harris waved cheerily to his BBC colleagues behind the waiting cameras. The news ran on a loop, increasingly celebratory in pitch as the Press was gripped by an intense wave of national euphoria.

Operation Nimrod ended officially at 19.34, and authority was transferred back from the SAS to the police, returning control from the military to the civilian powers. It had lasted just 11 minutes. As the sun was starting to set over Princes Gate, what Whitelaw called 'the twilight area between peace and war' was over. The SAS, meanwhile, just slipped away.

Margaret Thatcher attended many functions in her capacity as Prime Minister, but nothing quite like the party that erupted at Regent's Park Barracks that evening.

She arrived to find the SAS in full victory celebration, already several cases into a stack of lukewarm Foster's lager, still wearing combat gear, faces streaked black, reeking of gas and smoke, shouting, laughing, singing.

'The state of excitement was something I've never seen in my life before,' according to a Cabinet Office official. 'They were like a pack of hounds. The air was thick with testosterone.'

Thatcher moved among them, oddly at ease among adrenalised men of war. Her husband Denis fell into conversation with Lance-Corporal Tom MacDonald.

'You let one of the bastards live,' he shouted above the din, with 'a big grin'. As she posed for photographs with men in balaclavas holding guns, Thatcher seemed tearful. But perhaps it was just the residual tear gas.

Just before 9pm, someone turned on a large television, and the men settled down to watch themselves for the first time.

The news opened with a figure in black clambering across a balcony to plant explosives. At that moment someone with bouffant hair obscured the screen.

'Oi, effing sit down at the front,' shouted Lance-Corporal McAleese, who wanted a clear view of his moment of anonymous fame.

The person with big hair obediently ducked out of the way. No one ever spoke to Mrs Thatcher that way. But who dares wins.

Adapted from The Siege by Ben Macintyre (Viking, £25). © Ben Macintyre 2024. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid to 26/10; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.

In the second part of Ben Macintyre's exhilarating account, yesterday's Mail on Sunday recounted how the SAS stormed the Iranian Embassy during the 1980 siege. The third and final part of this thrilling tale sees troopers re-enter the building to take down the terrorist gunmen, as PM Margaret Thatcher awaits further news…