POLITICAL TENSIONS in Iran ahead of watershed presidential elections on June 12th intensified yesterday with the discovery of a homemade bomb on board a domestic airliner. The incident closely followed a deadly attack on a mosque that hardline Iranian leaders blamed on the US, Israel and Britain.
Iranian news reports said the device was found shortly after a Tehran-bound Kish Air flight with 131 passengers on board took off from Ahvaz, in Khuzestan province in southwest Iran.
Irna, the official Iran news agency, said only that there had been a plot against the flight. “The plot . . . was unsuccessful due to the security forces’ awareness and those behind it were arrested,” it said.
The Ahvaz incident followed an apparent suicide bombing on Thursday at a mosque in Zahedan, in Sistan-Baluchistan province in southeastern Iran, which killed 25 people and wounded more than 100. Three men convicted of planning the explosion were executed on Saturday.
Khuzestan and Sistan-Baluchistan provinces have witnessed numerous attacks attributed to separatists, ethnic and religious groups, and mujahideen resistance fighters since the 1979 revolution. Oil-rich Khuzestan, which borders Iraq, is home to Iran’s Arab minority. Sistan-Baluchistan, bordering Pakistan, has a high concentration of Sunni Muslims. Iran is predominantly Shia.
With elections looming, the authorities have pointed the finger at external forces for the security alarms. Iran’s leaders have repeatedly blamed US and Israeli “spy agencies” for assisting insurgent groups. They say the aim is to destabilise Iran.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader and a strong backer of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s bid to win a second term, said: “No one can doubt that the hands of . . . some interfering powers and their spying services are bloodied by the blood of the innocent.”
Maj Gen Hassan Firouzabadi, Iran’s armed forces chief of staff, blamed Britain. Jalal Sayyah, a spokesman for the governor’s office in Sistan-Baluchistan, told state radio: “The terrorists, who were equipped by America in one of our neighbouring countries, carried out this criminal act in their efforts to create religious conflict and fear and to influence the presidential election.”
But any US involvement in fomenting tensions is considered unlikely, given Obama’s policy of engagement with Iran. Israel, which believes Iran poses an existential threat, takes a harder line.
Analysts suggest hardline conservatives who back Ahmadinejad against the main reformist presidential candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, may try to use such incidents to whip up anti-American and anti-western sentiment.
Reports last year said the Bush administration obtained $400 million in "off-the-books" congressional funding to finance covert operations aimed at assisting minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organisations inside Iran. It is unclear whether these alleged operations have continued since Obama took office. A White House spokesman said Obama "strongly condemns" the Zahedan attack. A Sunni opposition group known as Jundullah (God's Soldiers), which Iran links to al-Qaeda and the US, claimed responsibility for the mosque bomb. But it said the executed men were in jail when it happened. – ( Guardianservice)