Iran Hijacks VP’s NY Motorcade; Obama Sends Destroyer, Urges Calm

“There is too much at stake to go headlong into a full-blown confrontation over every incident.”

Washington, April 29 – Iranian cars stopped and seized the vehicles carrying and escorting US Vice President Joe Biden through New York’s streets today, and took him and his staff into custody at the country’s mission to the United Nations. In response, President Obama urged calm and ordered the navy to dispatch the destroyer Poltroon to the East River.

Biden’s motorcade was ferrying him from John F. Kennedy International Airport to a meeting with Democratic Party donors in Midtown this morning when a group of eleven Iranian vehicles surrounded it and ordered the drivers to follow them. When the motorcade resisted, Iran’s agents fired across the hoods of the American vehicles and commandeered the six cars. The head of the vice president’s Secret Service detail sent out a distress call, and the Poltroon was sent to the vicinity. By the time it arrived, however, Biden, his staff, security detail, and vehicles had been impounded in the Iran mission’s underground garage.

Iranian sources said the motorcade had violated the country’s territorial waters, and that its agents were defending the country’s maritime integrity. Manhattan, as an Island, falls within Iran’s territorial waters, the country’s navy said in a statement. The statement also said the detainees were in good condition and that none of Iran’s vehicles suffered any damage in the incident. There was as yet no word on the state of the motorcade cars.

The president, wary of further stirring up already-heightened tensions with Iran over its nuclear program and support for Houthi rebels in Yemen, sought to strike a cautious, conciliatory note. “What we need at the moment is for cooler heads to prevail,” he told reporters at the White House. “There is too much at stake to go headlong into a full-blown confrontation over every incident.”

According to some initial reports the captive motorcade was that of the president himself, but Obama was not in New York when the incident occurred; he was playing golf in Virginia while receiving occasional reports on the clashes in Baltimore between protesters and police. A slightly later version of the story had the Japanese ambassador to the UN as the captive dignitary, but that report evidently confused the passengers in the cars with the manufacturer of the vehicles.

A Pentagon spokesman said that an internal review indicated the president was not legally obligated to secure the captives’ release. “The legal situation here is murky,” said Captain Thedd Arq. “If indeed the motorcade violated Iran’s territorial waters, as they claim, all we can do is wait until their government decides to release our people.”