A Sunni rebel group has killed two Iranian policemen after kidnapping a group of officers last week in the volatile border area the Islamic Republic shares with Pakistan, Al Arabiya television said today.
It showed a video of two blindfolded men kneeling on the ground. The broadcaster said it would not show the full footage of the killings to avoid disturbing viewers.
The rebel group, Jundollah (God's Soldiers), threatened yesterday to kill the policemen it was holding unless Tehran met its demands, including the release of jailed comrades, the satellite channel said.
Jundollah, whom predominantly Shia Iran has linked to al-Qaeda, set a deadline of June 27th for their demands to be met.
Iran said last weekend bandits kidnapped 16 policemen and took them to nearby Pakistan, after attacking a police station in the volatile province of Sistan-Baluchestan, notorious for frequent clashes with drug smugglers and home to Iran's mostly Sunni Muslim ethnic Baluchis.
In August, Iran blamed the group for taking hostage 30 people in the province. Those hostages, taken by their captors to Pakistan, were freed by Pakistani forces.
In 2007, Jundollah claimed responsibility for an attack on a bus carrying Iranian Revolutionary Guards that killed 11 people.
Iranian officials have said that the group's leader, Abdolmalek Rigi, was a leader of al-Qaeda's network in Iran.
Iran has often accused Washington and London of trying to destabilise the country by supporting rebels, mainly in sensitive border areas.