Suicide bombers 'kill at least 15' in Iran

Two suicide bombers blew themselves up near a mosque in south-eastern Iran, killing at least 15 people at a Shiite mourning ceremony, Iranian media reported.

The attack took place outside the Imam Hussein Mosque in the port city of Chabahar, near the border with Pakistan, the official IRNA news agency said, quoting politician Mohammad Yaghoub Jedgal.

The attack targeted a group of worshippers at a mourning ceremony a day before Ashoura, which commemorates the seventh-century death of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hussein, one of Shiite Islam’s most beloved saints.

The area of Iran is home to an armed Sunni militant group, Jundallah, or Soldiers of God, which has waged sporadic attacks to fight alleged discrimination against the area’s Sunni minority in overwhelmingly Shiite Iran.

One of the attackers detonated a bomb outside the mosque and the other struck from inside a crowd of worshippers, state TV reported.

Mahmoud Mozaffar, a senior Iranian Red Crescent Society official, put the number of dead at 15 and said more than 50 people were injured, the semi-official ISNA news agency reported.

Mr Mozaffar was also quoted as saying that the Red Crescent had been put on alert over the past few days because of anonymous threats.

In July, twin blasts in the same province, Sistan-Baluchestan, killed at least 27 people. Jundallah said that attack was revenge for the execution of its leader, Abdulmalik Rigi, in June.

Iranian officials claim Jundallah, which has operated from bases in Pakistan, receives support from Western powers, including the US. Washington denies any links to the group and in November the State Department added Jundallah to a US list of foreign terrorist organisations.

Drug traffickers and smugglers are also active along the barren frontier area of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan and have launched attacks on security forces.