TEHRAN: A small group of Iranian demonstrators managed to scale the gate of the Danish embassy in Tehran on Monday, as police fired teargas in a bid to prevent a full-scale storming of the compound.

The attack came as around 400 student members of the hardline Basij militia pelted the leafy diplomatic compound with Molotov cocktails and rocks as part of escalating Iranian protests over sacrilegious cartoons published in European newspapers.

The cartoons were first published in September by the conservative Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

They have since appeared in newspapers in Norway, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

“They are prisoners of a bunch of blood-sucking Zionists, and they do not understand the meaning of freedom at all,” President Ahmadinejad said of the newspapers.

“They claim that the press is free, but they do not even publish a word about the rights of the Palestinians.”

Some 100 policemen quickly intervened, forcing the protesters back by firing several volleys of tear gas. Anti-riot police also slipped into the embassy compound through a side door to remove the small number of protesters who had managed to get inside the mission and cause some damage.—AFP