Two Russian officials expelled after US diplomat attacked

MNA International Desk: Two Russian officials were expelled after US diplomat attacked. According to reports, the United States has expelled two Russian officials in reprisal for the beating of a U.S. diplomat last month in Moscow, the State Department spokesman said Friday.

“On June 17, we expelled two Russian officials from the United States to respond to this attack,” said spokesperson John Kirby. Kirby also said the attack was “unprovoked and it endangered the safety of our employee.”

The Russian guard tackled and wounded the American after the diplomat showed him his embassy badge, State Department officials told to media.

The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a different description of what happened. It said the American was a CIA agent who refused to give his identification papers, and then attacked the Russian guard, not vice versa.

“Instead of letting the (Russian) officer see his ID, the man hit him with an elbow in the face than (sic) pushed him away and fled to the embassy,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

The June 6 fight between the police officer and the diplomat was captured on security footage and broadcast on Russian television last week. It showed a man emerging from a taxi and walking briskly up the embassy steps.

He was just outside the door when a guard jumped out of a gatehouse and wrestled him to the ground. Even with the patrolman on top of him, the diplomat pushed with his feet and managed while on his back to get inside the door to the embassy, which is U.S. territory and inviolate.

The tape briefly stopped, when the man exits the taxi at the bottom of the steps, and picked up again from a slightly different angle.

However, a U.S. official said that American authorities examined “a number of videos taken from different perspectives, which “clearly show attempts to show his ID, and that he was instantly attacked.”

Under the Vienna convention, host governments provide security outside missions while the nations themselves are accountable inside the mission walls. In many compounds in the world, local police regularly ask for recognition from anyone approaching inside.

The State Department has later claimed that since sanctions were forced on Russia after it annexed Ukraine two years ago, there has been a ‘significant increase’ in Russian irritation of diplomats from the United States and other Western countries.