TEHRAN — Sunni rebels who were believed to have abducted 16 soldiers near the Pakistani border earlier this year have killed all their captives, a senior Iranian security official told a news agency on Thursday.
The official, Ahmadreza Radan, a deputy national police chief, told the Mehr news agency that the soldiers “were martyred by Abdolmalek Rigi’s terrorist group.”
Mr. Radan did not actually say how many soldiers were killed, but unofficial reports had said that 13 were kidnapped in June at the Saravan checkpoint in southeastern Iran and were taken over the border into Pakistan. Three more were kidnapped a month later, probably in the same part of the country, which brought the number of hostages to 16. The semi-official Fars news agency reported Thursday that “all the 13 hostages kidnapped at Saravan checkpoint were killed.” It was not clear when and where the killings took place.
An investigation by “the Interior, Intelligence and Foreign affairs Ministries and the police has shown that all of our loved ones have been martyred by Jundallah terrorists,” Mr. Radan said. Unofficial Web sites reported that Jundallah, Mr. Rigi’s group, had asked for the release of 200 of its members, including Mr. Rigi’s brother, in return for the release of the hostages.
Iran has condemned Jundallah, which means soldiers of God, as a terrorist organization with ties to Al Qaeda and narcotics traffickers. It has been active mostly in the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan, where a large community of Sunnis live. The group has said that it is waging a struggle against discrimination of Sunnis by the Iranian authorities. It claimed responsibility for the February 2007 bombing of a bus carrying members of the Revolutionary Guards in the southeastern city of Zahedan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/world/middleeast/05iran.html?_r=1 |
