No word on who caused this blast, I find it odd there is a bombing in Tehran. Here’s the Reuters article:
TEHRAN (Reuters) – A bomb exploded in a mosque in southern Iran on Saturday, killing at least eight people and wounding more than 60 others, Iranian media reported.
Ambulances rushed to the scene of the blast in a crowded district in the city of Shiraz, state television said.
“The death toll has reached eight and about 66 injured,” the semi-official Fars news agency said, quoting a police official, identified only as General Zamani.
The agency, quoting an unnamed official, said the death toll was expected to rise because some of the wounded were in a critical condition.
State television urged people in Shiraz to donate blood for the injured, adding that all nurses in the city had been called in on duty.
The official IRNA news agency said the bomb exploded during an address by a cleric in the Shohada mosque in Shiraz.
Fars said on Saturday nights the cleric usually gave speeches on the Baha’i faith, an offshoot of Islam considered heretical by Iran’s Shi’ite Muslim establishment and its members claim they face discrimination and persecution in Iran.
Iran says all Iranians, regardless of creed, enjoy the same rights. Local officials were not immediately available for comment on the blast.
UNDER INVESTIGATION
No one has claimed responsibility for the blast but the deputy governor of the province, Mohammad Reza Hadaegh, told state television the cause of the blast was under investigation.
Security is normally tight in Iran, where bomb attacks have been rare in recent years. However, in 2005 and 2006, several people were killed in a string of blasts in the southwestern oil city of Ahvaz.
Sixty-five men were arrested in February and accused of being behind a bombing that killed members of the elite Revolutionary Guards in a southeastern border province, which has a minority Arab population.
Tehran has in the past accused Britain and the United States of trying to destabilize the country by supporting ethnic minority rebels operating in sensitive border areas.
Washington accuses Iran of destabilizing Iraq by supporting Iraqi Shi’ite militia groups.
The United States also is leading efforts to isolate Iran over its nuclear program, which the West fears is a cover to acquire nuclear bombs. Tehran says its atomic work is solely to generate electricity.
(Additional reporting by Zahra Hosseinian and Hossein Jaseb, Writing by Parisa Hafezi, Editing by Alison Williams)
Filed under: Geopolitics
“No word on who caused this blast”…………….. It had to start somewhere .more will be inevitable most likely
When you spend all that time training wild-eyed crazies in bomb-making and use, as the Iranian Qod does, one of them just might turn some of his resentment your way some day.
Oh, please. Waiting for the other shoe (or is that a false flag) to drop.
Well, this will be a bit disappointing to the BushHitler conspiracy crowd:
“…was caused by negligent handling of live munitions…The police commander said the munitions were apparently left behind after a “Sacred Defense” exhibition was held at the mosque, which also serves as a cultural center”
But then, there’s no problem with a society who thinks bombs routinely belong in their religious facilities or ‘cultural centers’, is there?
Has anyone seen evidence beyond the myriad Cheneyesque unsupported assertions the the Quds are supporting 4th Generation fighters? I’ve heard it said frequently, but I’ve never heard more than that. You’d think at this point the inherent liberal media bias (of which there are also numerous assertions in the face of evidence that is more than a bit sketchy) would lead to a slightly more rigorous process than “Cheney said, I believe it, that settles it (and I’ll repeat it like a mantra until enough Americas believe it too)”.
Just for fun, let’s assume the Quds are training “wild-eyed crazies” (a nicely proto-racist characterization that does not facilitate productive dialogue). If so, they are better at it than the CIA (which has been at it much longer, so much for the “experience” argument, Hillary). The US government is in no position to criticize other governments that train 4th Generation fighters, since we’ve been doing that at least as long as anyone else.
I may be wrong. (That would not be a new experience for me.) Perhaps we do have moral obligation to secretly meddle in the internal workings of other countries. But even if that is true, such an obligation is trumped by the sad fact that WE SUCK AT IT. Every example I can think of has resulted in either abject failure (Can you say “Bay of Pigs”? Sure, I knew you could.) or eventual blowback that far overshadowed any initial success, like our overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953.
Until we demonstrate some rudimentary facility for governing our own country properly, we should keep our noses out of other people’s countries, particularly when that meddling takes the form of training “wild-eyed crazies” in the ways of 4th Generation War.
Well, Lamont; you might to go argue this all with Gen. Petraeus, since he discusses Iranian Qod involvement often enough. And unlike you or me (or Cheney), he’s the ‘boots on the ground’ guy there who happens to be succeeding.
And it looks like from the link in my comment above my intentional ‘wild-eyed crazy’ theory was as wrong as your Cheney/BushHitler plot one. Just the local boys leaving their munitions lying around the mosque. Nothing wild-eyed and crazy about that, right?
And you think our government doesn’t work?
I’ve heard unsupported assertions from Petraeus as well. I’m still short of data, and not for lack of looking. As for Petraeus’ “success”, sometimes even a blind squirrel finds an acorn. The origins of the “Sunni Awakening” predated the surge tactic. He was smart enough to recognize it as a phenomenon that could help him, so he’s helped it along through bribery. We’ve seen the short-term benefit; I’ll reserve judgement until we see the blowback. As for any success in the East, that has more to do with a politcal calculus by Moqtada al Sadr than anything else.
Got to run – I’ve got an errand. I would like some clarification on the middle paragraph of the posting immediately above. Those words appear to be in English, a language I’ve spoken for over 5 decades and read for nearly as long, yet I am unable to extract any meaning from them. I really need to get better at the whole reading comprehension thing.
‘unsupported assertions’; you think the General might have some sources of information he might just not scream out to the whole world to get them killed. You want to know why the committees don’t run roughshod over him? It’s the specifics he gives them in the closed door hearings.
Lamont, and how much time have you spent in the sand? Probably about as much as I.
May I make a suggestion: try reading some of Michael Yon’s work. As a FULLY independent journalist, he’s seen more real goings on there than any other single news source. He is no apologist for the Bush administration; his new book “Moment of Truth in Iraq’ is pretty hard on the strategic aspects employed before Petraeous. Yon was one of the first to declare the civil war in Iraq (which he says has now ended) and called increased problems in Afghanistan a year before they happened.
He certainy does not dismiss the Awakening as ‘bribery’; bribery is the way things have always been done there and we were doing it since we hit the sand. It’s a fact that the tribal leaders have truly decided that we are by far the lesser of two evils. And they have now acted on it and seen the benefit of doing so.
Yon is in agreement with others that Petraeus has the right approach; he’s just come back from seeing the difference. You want a source? go read what he has to say.
Anyone who thinks it was a conspiracy seems a little off, it doesn’t even have a point to “start a war” or anything, I was just wondering if some al-Qaeda nuts turned against their shi’a neighbors