- TEHRAN (Reuters) - An oil
refinery depot in southwestern Iran close to the Iraqi border was hit by
a rocket on Friday, officials said, and the Islamic Republic warned Washington
and London to respect its airspace.
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- Government officials, who asked not to be named, told
Reuters it was not clear where the rocket, which hit the depot in the city
of Abadan at around 7.45 p.m. (1615 GMT), had come from.
-
- "When it happened the city of Abadan shook,"
Hossein, a government employee, told Reuters by telephone from Abadan which
is about 50 km (30 miles) east of the southern Iraqi city of Basra, and
on the opposite side of the Shatt al-Arab estuary from Iraq's Faw peninsula.
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- The Faw peninsula adjacent to Abadan was secured earlier
on Friday by British forces advancing into Iraq as part of a land attack
against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
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- Hossein said two guards at the Abadan depot were injured.
Government officials were unable to give any further details on the extent
of the damage. There was no indication that operations at Abadan's oil
refinery were affected and no reports of any other missiles falling on
Iranian territory.
-
- The official IRNA news agency, without referring directly
to the Abadan incident, said Iran's Foreign Ministry had expressed its
opposition to the violation of its airspace to the ambassadors of Britain
and Switzerland, which represents U.S. interests in the Islamic Republic.
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- Washington severed diplomatic relations with Tehran shortly
after the 1979 Islamic revolution.
-
- IRNA said the Foreign Ministry's director general of
legal affairs Mehdi Danesh Yazdi asked the envoys, who represent the two
counties with the largest military involvement in the attack on Iraq, "to
prevent such events from happening in future".
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- Heavy bombing by U.S. and British forces during the attack
on Faw shattered windows and caused villagers to flee in panic in neighbouring
Iran, according to IRNA.
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- Iran, which fought an eight-year war with Iraq in the
1980s in which hundreds of thousands were killed on both sides, has condemned
the U.S.-led attack on its western neighbour, but vowed not to be drawn
into the conflict.
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