An Iranian journalist is back on TV just a week after he was stabbed outside his home.
Pouria Zeraati, a 36-year-old presenter at London-based broadcaster Iran International, said “the show must go on” a week after he was attacked in London.
He was stabbed in the leg by three unknown assailants as he approached his car in Wimbledon, southwest London, on 29 March.
Police said no arrests have yet been made, but are confident the suspects “do not present a risk to communities of London or the UK”.
They believe the trio fled the country from Heathrow Airport shortly after the attack.
In a video teasing his first appearance on Iran International since he was attacked, he jokingly called his stint in hospital a “slight delay” and was applauded by others in the studio.
Speaking to ITV News ahead of his return, Mr Zeraati called the attack a “warning shot” and said: “The fact that they just stopped in my leg was their choice to do that.
“They had the opportunity to kill me because the way the second person was holding me and the first person took the knife out, they had the opportunity to stop anywhere they wanted.
“Whatever the motive was, the show must go on.”
Mehdi Hosseini Matin, the Iranian charge d’affaires in the UK, said “we deny any link” to the knife attack.
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Mr Zeraati also told ITV that he was “approached by a man, who pretended to be actually someone asking for £3 cash”, before the group held him and stabbed his leg.
He then said that “those three, four seconds” after he was stabbed “are moments I’ll never forget in my life because the moment I saw the knife in his hand until he stabbed me in my leg, all I was thinking was where he was going to hit, you know, is it going to cut my throat?”.
“My heart is he’s going to kill me,” the journalist added. “And then straight after stabbing in, they just started running away.”
Iran International editor Niusha Boghrati previously told Sky News that the station was guarded by armed police, saying in February that “the threats have turned into a reality of terrorism”.
The broadcaster temporarily shut down its operations in London early last year and moved to studios in Washington after what it described as an escalation of “state-backed threats from Iran”.
The station resumed operations at a new location in London last September.
A Chechen-born man was also jailed in December after being found guilty of spying on Iran International to help terror plotters.
Source Agencies
