A spokesman for Iran's foreign ministry was harassed by a small group of protesters near the United Nations in New York on Wednesday, after an address to the international body by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Video posted online by witnesses showed the diplomat, Ramin Mehmanparast, being jostled and shouted at as he crossed a street, before police officers stepped in to protect him, ordering the protesters back. A spokesman for the New York City Police Department told The Associated Press that Mr. Mehmanparast was confronted on Second Avenue near East 48th Street.
Video of the incident obtained by the news agency from a documentary filmmaker showed that the protesters included a man wrapped in an old Iranian flag; another man in a yellow vest worn by supporters of the Mujahedeen Khalq, a powerful Iranian exile group known as the M.E.K. or M.K.O.; and a woman wearing the T-shirt of Ma Hastim, Persian for “We Are,†a rights group associated with the Iranian exile community in Los Angeles.
Iran's state-run satellite news channel, Press TV, blamed the attack on supporters of the Mujahedeen Khalq, identifying them as “anti-Iran M.K.O. terrorists.†As our colleague Scott Shane reported last week, Sec retary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has decided to remove the Mujahedeen Khalq from the State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, after an intense lobbying campaign on behalf of the group.
In an e-mail to The Times, Alireza Miryousefi, the press attaché for Iran's Mission to the United Nations, characterized the incident as “aggression by M.E.K. sect members†against Mr. Mehmanparast. He added that removing the “terrorist sect†from the State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations “would be another wrong step by the U.S. administration.â€
Another video clip, apparently recorded on the phone of a man shouting threats at Mr. Mehmanparast from very close range, showed police officers escorting the diplomat away from protesters screaming “terrorist!†At one point in the video, Mr. Mehmanparast walks past a pharmacy at the corner of 48th Street and Second Avenue.
Iranian opposition video bloggers drew attention to a third clip that appeared to show the same incident from another angle, recorded from above the street, that has been copied and viewed more than 100,000 times on YouTube.
The incident came after Iranian exiles rallied outside the United Nations to protest Mr. Ahmadinejad's speech. Maryam Rajavi, the leader of the the Mujahedeen Khalq, which is described as a cult by some former members, addressed the rally from France by satellite. Patrick Kennedy, a former congressman from Rhode Island, who admitted on camera last year that he had been paid $25,000 to voice his support for the M.E.K. at a rally in Washington, also addressed Wednesday's protest.
Homeira Hesami, an M.E.K. organizer and Iranian expatriate who is a medical technician in Texas, told The Times that a group of Iranian officials, wi th police officer escorts, were walking west on 47th Street from the U.N. campus toward Second Avenue at around 1:30 when a number of protesters recognized Mr. Mehmanparast. Ms. Hesami was across the street. “I saw him walking by and of course we started chanting, ‘Get lost!' in Farsi,†she said. “People were angry at him and surrounded him. The presence of Ahmadinejad at the U.N. made people very emotional.â€
She said the M.E.K. protesters were commingled with Syrians protesting the Assad government. “We suffer from the same pain,†she said. “We were side by side. It wasn't like they had their own thing and we had our own thing.â€
A man who identified himself as Gregory Nelson boasted to The Daily News that he had managed to punch the Iranian diplomat in the stomach during the melee.
Mr. Nelson, who identified himself as a former soldier, said that he flew to New York from Fayetteville, Ark., to attend the anti-Ahmadinejad protest. After a rally in favor of the M.E.K. in Washington last year, Zaid Jilani and Ali Gharib of the liberal Web site ThinkProgress interviewed several people who were bused or flown in for the demonstration who seemed to know little about the group's past involvement in terrorist attacks. Three of the men were from Fayetteville, Ark.
