At least 11 police officers were killed in southeastern Iran in one of the deadliest attacks by a jihadist group active along the border with Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The attackers attacked the police headquarters in the town of Rask in the restive Sistan-Baluchistan province around midnight on Thursday.
“Eleven police officers were killed and others injured during the terrorist attack,” provincial deputy governor Alireza Marhamati said on television.
“The officers who were at the attacked military headquarters bravely defended themselves. They injured and killed some of the attackers,” he said, quoted by the official Irna agency.
For his part, the prosecutor of Zahedan, the regional capital, Mehdi Shamsabadi, announced that seven police officers were injured, some of whom were in “critical condition.”
The police commander of Sistan-Baluchistan was present in Rask on Friday morning, where “the situation is under control,” IRNA said.
Deputy Interior Minister Majid Mirahmadi said on television that “one of the terrorists” had been arrested by police.
The attackers “failed to escape across the border” and the region is now “completely under siege,” he added.
The ISNA news agency showed footage of a helicopter searching for attackers over mountains on the Iran-Pakistan border.
Attacks and executions
In the vast desert region of Sistan-Balochistan, there are frequent clashes between law enforcement authorities on the one hand and drug traffickers, rebels from the Baloch minority and radical Sunni groups on the other.
This province is one of the poorest in Iran and is predominantly home to the Baloch ethnic minority, who adhere to Sunni Islam rather than Iran's predominant Shiite branch.
In a short statement posted on its Telegram channel, the Baloch jihadist group Jaish al-Adl (“Army of Justice” in Arabic) claimed responsibility for the attack.
This group was founded in 2012 by former members of a radical Sunni organization that led a bloody insurgency in the region until 2010.
He is particularly known for claiming responsibility for the kidnapping of twelve Iranian police officers and soldiers in the same province in October 2018.
In July, two police officers were killed in an attack on a police station in Zahedan, according to the group.
The group accused the targeted Rask police station of being “one of the main perpetrators of the Bloody Friday tragedy,” referring to the violence in September 2022.
The city of Zahedan was at the time the scene of several days of deadly violence that erupted following the alleged rape of a teenage girl by a police officer.
In recent years, authorities in Sistan-Baluchistan have carried out numerous executions, particularly of people convicted of drug trafficking or “acts of terrorism.”
In November, three men convicted of collaborating with Jaish al-Adl and an attack on a police station in 2019 were hanged there.
The attacked police station is near the Makki Mosque, which is led by the influential religious leader of the province's Sunni Muslim minority, Molavi Abdol Hamid.
He condemned “any manifestation of violence” and emphasized that he did not know who was behind the attack.