Shia Protesters Ransack Morocco’s Beirut Embassy

Hundreds of Shia Muslim demonstrators smashed their way into the virtually deserted Moroccan Embassy in West Beirut and ransacked it Friday to protest talks in Morocco between King Hassan II and Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, witnesses said.

The commander of the Lebanese police guard said there were no casualties. He said the embassy’s six-man staff lowered the Moroccan flag and quietly slipped away in two cars half an hour before the attack. “They must have anticipated what was coming,” he said.

Police said the assault climaxed an hourlong demonstration by about 2,000 men and women waving portraits of Iran’s leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and shouting “Death to America, the great Satan!” “Down with traitor Hassan!” and “Peres will roast in hell!” They were from the Iran-allied Hezbollah (Party of God), the most militant of Lebanon’s Shia factions.

Head-to-Toe Gowns

Dozens of the women wore chadors, the black head-to-toe gowns that obscure all but the hands and eyes. They looked on as the men broke up electrical equipment, scattered thousands of documents and photos and set mattresses ablaze in the embassy gardens.

After some of the zealots scaled the embassy building’s walls and others broke through the gate, they smashed a portrait of Hassan and hoisted the flag of Hezbollah where Morocco’s flag had flown. Others hurled furniture through windows into the street.

The demonstrators left the building after holding it for about half an hour.

The police guard commander said his small detachment of about a dozen men had been unable to stop the assault. Firefighters were called to quell small blazes started by the invaders.

The protest was the most violent so far in the Arab world against the two-day meeting this week of the moderate, pro-Western monarch and the Israeli prime minister at Hassan’s summer palace in Ifrane, Morocco.