TEHRAN, July 16, (Agencies): Two rebel suicide bombers killed at least 28 people, including elite Revolutionary Guards, at a prominent Shi’ite Muslim mosque in southeast Iran, an attack Iranian leaders said was backed by the United States.
The Sunni Muslim rebel group Jundollah said it set off the bombs in the Islamic state on Thursday, telling Al Arabiya television in an email it carried them out in retaliation for Iran’s execution in June of the group’s leader, Abdolmalek Rigi.
Jundollah says it fights for the rights of Iran’s Sunni Muslim minority. The clerical leadership accuses its arch foe, the United States, of backing Jundollah in order to create instability in Iran. Washington denies the charge.
The powerful bombs exploded near the city of Zahedan’s Grand Mosque scattering body parts around the holy site, and Jundollah said they were carried out by relatives of Rigi and were aimed at a Revolutionary Guards gathering.
“The group said the suicide attacks were carried out by Abdolbaset Rigi and Mohammad Rigi ... and warned of more operations to come,” Dubai-based Al Arabiya said.
Iranian officials said Washington was behind the attacks.
Senior lawmaker Alaeddin Boroujerdi said the United States should be held accountable for the “terrorist acts in Zahedan” because of its support for Jundollah, the IRNA news agency said.
“Once more the wicked hand of America appeared out of the sleeves of ignorant and mercenary people,” cleric Kazem Sediqi said in a Friday prayer sermon broadcast live on state radio.
Iran is locked in a dispute with the United States and its allies over Tehran’s nuclear programme, which the West says is designed to produce nuclear weapons and Iranian officials say aims to generate power.
The head of the medical school at Sistan-Baluchestan province, Mansour Shakiba, said the attacks had killed at least 28 people and injured more than 169, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported.
Iran’s deputy Interior Minister in charge of security, Ali Abdollahi, said a number of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards had been killed and injured, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.
Predominantly Shi’ite Muslim Iran arrested Rigi in February, four months after Jundollah claimed responsibility for 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.
Zahedan’s representative to parliament Hosseinali Shahriari resigned over the attacks “because of the inability of authorities to maintain security in his constituency”, the website of Iran’s English-language Press TV reported on Friday.
In Washington, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the attacks “in the strongest possible terms”.
“This attack, along with the recent attacks in Uganda, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Algeria, underscores the global community’s need to work together to combat terrorist organisations that threaten the lives of innocent civilians all around the world,” Clinton said in a statement.
Iran says Jundollah 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.
All three countries have denied this, and Jundollah denies having any links with al-Qaeda .
In May 2009, a suicide bomber killed 30 people and wounded more than 120 in an attack on a mosque in Zahedan.
Iran is grappling with ethnic and religious tensions in the southeastern province, where authorities have responded to attacks by Sunni rebels with a spate of hangings. Rights groups and the West have condemned the hangings.
Iran rejects allegations by rights groups that it discriminates against ethnic and religious minorities.
Condolences
His Highness the Amir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah sent a cable on Friday to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in which he expressed his heart-felt condolences on the victims of the blasts that targeted a mosque yesterday in the southeast of the Persian state. Dozens of people were killed and wounded in the blast.
His Highness the Amir expressed Kuwait’s condemnation of such terrorist attacks, which targeted the lives of innocent people, adding that they were against the principles of Islam and humanitarian conduct.
He prayed that Almighty Allah would have mercy on the souls of the deceased, and wished swift recovery for the wounded. His Highness the Crown Prince Sheikh Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah and His Highness the Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser Al-Mohammad Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah sent similar cables of condolences to the Persian leader.
US President Barack Obama on Friday strongly condemned “outrageous terrorist attacks” in Iran after a shadowy Sunni group claimed bombings in a Shiite mosque which killed 27 people.
“I strongly condemn the outrageous terrorist attacks on a mosque in southeast Iran,” Obama said in a written statement.
“The murder of innocent civilians in their place of worship is an intolerable offense, and those who carried it out must be held accountable.”
“The United States stands with the families and loved ones of those killed and injured, and with the Iranian people, in the face of this injustice,” Obama said.
“Together, the people of the world must condemn and oppose all forms of terrorism, and support the universal right of human beings to live free from fear and senseless violence.”
UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Friday blasted as a “senseless act of terrorism” the twin suicide bombings on a mosque in Iran that left 27 people dead.
The UN secretary general, currently on a visit to Madrid, “strongly condemns the suicide bombings in Zahedan, Iran,” Farhan Haq, a UN spokesman, told a press briefing. “This senseless act of terrorism at a place of worship makes it all the more reprehensible.”
Scientist
Meanwhile, the Iranian scientist who spent 14 months in the United States in mysterious circumstances had been a CIA informant inside Iran for years, The New York Times reported Friday.
“Shahram Amiri described to American intelligence officers details of how a university in Tehran became the covert headquarters for the country’s nuclear efforts,” the report said citing unnamed US officials.
“While still in Iran, he was also one of the sources for a much-disputed National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s suspected weapons program, published in 2007,” it further cited the officials as saying.
Indeed it was “for several years” that “Amiri provided what one official described as ‘significant, original’ information about secret aspects of his country’s nuclear program,” the US officials were quoted as saying.
Amiri, repeating his claims he had been abducted by US spies, 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.”