Ex-SAS officer details how his team saved 19 lives in seven minutes during terrorist hostage attack in London

On 30 April, 1980, a group of six armed men stormed the Iranian embassy in London and took 26 people hostage there, triggering a six-day siege which was decisively ended when the SAS acted.

Over the first few days negotiators were able to secure the release of five hostages, and SAS veteran Robin Horsfall told LADbible how they prepared to go into the building and enact a rescue of the others.

He explained that the SAS had trained in hostage rescue drills with live ammunition, putting their own personnel in chairs and shooting at targets near them with actual bullets.

Horsfall explained that the negotiation team were tasked with delaying the situation to give the SAS time to 'prepare a deliberate action'.

To cover the surveillance of the Iranian embassy, a gasworks operator started drilling the ground outside the building to create distracting noise and planes to Heathrow Airport were diverted so they'd be making noise overhead.

26 hostages were taken, there were 20 remaining when the SAS was given permission to go in, they managed to rescue 19 of them (YouTube/LADbibleTV)

On the sixth day (5 May), the Iranian embassy's press officer Abbas Lavasani was executed by one of the terrorists known as 'Faisal', the group's second-in-command.

Horsfall explained that this resulted in a string of permissions coming down from the prime minister to give the green light to 'Operation Nimrod', the rescue mission.

At this point Horsfall had completed four tours in Northern Ireland and was ready to do his part in the plan, where various teams would 'silently approach our different entry points on each floor' and place charges on the windows and doors they would breach.

They'd trigger their charges at the same time and storm the embassy simultaneously, and as he was approaching the building Horsfall remembered thinking 'concentrate, concentrate on your job, don't worry about anything else'.

However, things went wrong in that moment as one of their team accidentally put their foot through a window while rappelling down the building and that made the terrorists suspicious.

The terrorist leader had been on the phone with a hostage negotiator at the time and said he was going to investigate the suspicious noise, resulting in the SAS having to go earlier.

"The famous footage that most people have seen of the team on the front of the building climbing over the balcony, placing a charge and then exploding it while they're only a few inches away from it was carried out at that speed because all of a sudden everything had to be done in a hurry," Horsfall explained.

The SAS veteran explained that his team didn't have time to place their charges, so one of his comrades 'comes along with a massive great big eight pound sledgehammer and just takes out the patio doors'.

The soldier who put his foot through the window ended up getting stuck on his rope and since the curtains had caught fire he was getting burned and screaming.

At this point their commander 'must have been thinking that everything had gone wrong' because 'all he could hear was a man screaming down the radio and he'd had his approach compromised'.

However, once the SAS got into the building they got to work and their handling of the situation made these formerly secret soldiers world famous.

There had been 26 hostages in the building to begin with (YouTube/LADbibleTV)

One of their numbers had his head catch fire as he entered the building, so removed his gas hood which was melting away and re-entered the Iranian embassy where he killed two of the terrorists.

Robin and his partner went into the building 'expecting all hell to be letting loose' but he found it was 'organised on the inside' and 'exactly how it should be in a training exercise'.

Embassy staff started coming down the stairs and were 'passed hand to hand, hand to hand, out the door' to get them to safety.

Horsfall said there was then 'a scuffle at the top of the stairs' and one of his teammates 'butt-swiped' the man, who was identified as a terrorist.

He said that he and his partner opened fire on the terrorist, who had been holding a hand grenade but not set it off.

The SAS identified that someone who'd gone out with the hostages was actually a terrorist, and separated him from the rest.

"The mission took seven minutes from the 'go, go, go' to the time we had everybody out of the building," Horsfall explained.

"There had been 26 hostages in the building to begin with, that was reduced to 20 by the time we did the assault. One of the hostages was murdered by the terrorists as we made the entry.

"19 were rescued alive, five terrorists were killed and one was captured."