TEHRAN, July 15, (Agencies): At least 21 people, including members of the elite Revolutionary Guards, were killed and 100 wounded in suicide attack at a Shiite mosque in the southeast Iranian city of Zahedan on Thursday, Iranian media reported.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the two suicide bombings in front of Zahedan’s Grand Mosque, although a lawmaker said he believed the Sunni rebel group Jundollah was behind the attack.
“In the two explosions in Zahedan more than 20 people were killed and over 100 were injured,” Fariborz Rashedi, head of the emergency unit at Sistan-Baluchestan province told IRNA.
It later quoted Zahedan prosecutor Mohammad Marzieh as saying that 21 people had died.
Iran’s deputy Interior Minister said “a number of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards were killed and injured”, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.
Zahedan’s MP Hoseinali Shahriari told Fars that he believed Sunni rebel group Jundollah was behind the explosions.
Iran hanged Jundollah’s leader, Abdolmalek Rigi, last month for his involvement in earlier deadly attacks in Iran.
Predominantly Shiite Muslim Iran arrested Rigi in February, four months after his Jundollah group claimed a bombing which killed dozens of people, including 15 members of the Guards. It was the deadliest attack in Iran since the 1980s.
Zahedan is the capital of Sistan-Baluchestan province which shares a border with Pakistan. The province faces serious security problems and there are frequent clashes between police and drug dealers and bandits.
In May 2009, a suicide bomber killed 30 people and wounded more than 120 in an attack on a mosque in Zahedan.
Jundollah is an insurgent group that says it is fighting for the rights of Iran’s Sunni Muslim minority.
Iran grapples with ethnic and religious tension in the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchestan where authorities have responded to attacks by Sunni rebels with a spate of hangings. Rights groups and the West have condemned the hangings.
Iran says the Sunni group has links to Sunni Islamist al Qaeda and in the past has accused Pakistan, Britain and the United States of backing Jundollah to create instability in southeast Iran. The three countries have denied this.
An Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would start a long war and probably not prevent Iran from eventually acquiring nuclear weapons, a think-tank said on Thursday.
Oxford Research Group, which promotes non-violent solutions to conflict, said military action should be ruled out as a response to Iran’s possible nuclear weapons ambitions.
“An Israeli attack on Iran would be the start of a protracted conflict that would be unlikely to prevent the eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and might even encourage it,” it said in a report.
It would also lead to instability and unpredictable security consequences for the region and the wider world, it added.
The United Nations Security Council imposed a fourth round of sanctions on Iran last month over a nuclear programme the West suspects is aimed at developing atomic weapons in secret. Iran says it wants nuclear energy for peaceful uses only.
The report, by Paul Rogers, professor of peace studies at the University of Bradford, said US military action against Iran appeared unlikely but Israel’s capabilities had increased.
“Long-range strike aircraft acquired from the United States, combined with an improved fleet of tanker aircraft, the deployment of long-range drones and the probable availability of support facilities in northeast Iraq and Azerbaijan, all increase Israel’s potential for action against Iran,” it said.
Israeli leaders usually speak only of leaving all options on the table, although Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon said in May that Israel had the capability to hit Iran.
Israel is widely believed to have the Middle East’s only nuclear arsenal. The Jewish state neither confirms nor denies this.
The Oxford report estimated it might take three to seven years for Iran to develop a small arsenal of nuclear weapons if it decided to do so. It said there was no firm evidence such a decision had been taken by the Islamic Republic.
Any Israeli strike would be focused not only on destroying nuclear and missile targets but would also hit factories and research centres and even university laboratories to damage Iranian expertise, the report said.
This would cause many civilian casualties, it added.
Military action would include the direct bombing of targets in Tehran and probably include attempts to kill technocrats who managed Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes, the report said.
Iran’s responses to an Israeli attack could include withdrawing from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and immediate action to produce nuclear weapons to deter further attacks, the report said.
They could also include missile attacks on Israel, closing the Strait of Hormuz to push up oil prices and paramilitary or missile attacks on Western oil facilities in the Gulf.
After a first strike, Israel might have to carry out regular air strikes to stop Iran developing atom bombs and medium-range missiles, the report said. “Iranian responses would also be long-term, ushering in a lengthy war with global as well as regional implications,” Rogers said.
Other options open to the West were to redouble efforts to get a diplomatic settlement or accept that Iran may eventually acquire a nuclear capability and use that as the start of a process of balanced regional de-nuclearisation, the report said.
Watchdog
Iran should be dealing “constructively” with the UN nuclear watchdog and leading world powers regarding its controversial nuclear program, a State Department spokesman said Wednesday.
“At this stage, the primary focus should be on Iran engaging constructively the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and the P5+1,” Philip Crowley said when asked about Turkey’s mediating efforts in the matter.
The P5+1 refers to the six major powers negotiating with Iran: the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany.
Crowley said that was the message US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton conveyed to her Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu in a telephone conversation earlier this week.
The spokesman said he believed the two top diplomats had “a mutual understanding” on who Iran should engage at this point, but stressed that Ankara and Tehran, as neighbors, were “within their rights” to continue their diplomatic contacts.
Davutoglu on Tuesday said nuclear talks with Iran could not take place without Turkey, when a reporter asked if it was true Clinton had told him to keep out of the issue.
Components
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ratcheted up the pressure on Iran on Thursday, urging it to explain the “military components” of its nuclear programme.
Russia has fostered lucrative trade ties with the Islamic Republic over the past two decades but the Kremlin under Medvedev has struck a distinctly worried tone about the potential threat from a nuclear-armed Iran.
“I would like to say that Iran is our rather active trading partner and has been tested by time, but that does not mean we are indifferent to the way Iran is developing its nuclear programme and we are not indifferent to how the military components of the corresponding programme look,” Medvedev said.
“In this respect, we are waiting for the appropriate explanations from Iran,” he said at a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg.
US President Barack Obama has sought to win Kremlin support for a tougher line against Tehran, and in June Moscow supported further United Nations Security Council sanctions against Iran.
Abducted
An Iranian scientist who spent 14 months in the United States in mysterious circumstances denied on his arrival in Tehran on Thursday that he had spilled Iran’s nuclear secrets to US agents.
Repeating his claims he had been abducted by US spies, Shahram Amiri told reporters at Tehran airport that not only did he have nothing to do with Iran’s controversial nuclear programme, he had also resisted US pressure to tell the media that he was a well-informed atomic scientist.
He said his captors wanted him to tell the US media that he had “defected on his own and was carrying important documents and a laptop which contained classified secrets of Iran’s military nuclear programme.”
“But with God’s will, I resisted,” Amiri said, soon after being welcomed at Tehran airport by his tearful son and overjoyed wife.
Amiri, who vanished from Saudi Arabia in June 2009 while on a pilgrimage, surfaced in Iran’s Interests Section in Washington two days ago.
He jetted out of Washington on Wednesday after US officials insisted he had arrived in the United States on his own free will and that there was nothing stopping him from leaving.
He insisted on his arrival in Tehran that he was a “simple researcher” and not involved in Iran’s nuclear programme, which world powers believe masks an atomic weapons drive despite continued Iranian denials.
“I had nothing to do with the Natanz and Fordo sites,” Amiri said, referring to Iran’s two uranium enrichment plants.
“It was a tool the US government brought up for political pressure,” he said, referring to reports he was a nuclear scientist.
“I have done no research on nuclear. I am a simple researcher who works in a university which is open to all and there is no secret work happening there.”
His denials come even as The Washington Post reported Thursday that Amiri was paid more than five million dollars by the CIA to provide intelligence on Iran’s nuclear programme.
Amiri “is not obligated to return the money but might be unable to access it after breaking off what US officials described as significant cooperation with the CIA and abruptly returning to Iran,” the Post report said.