Iran says it has executed three men convicted of involvement in
Thursday's deadly suicide bombing of a Shi'ite mosque in southeastern
Iran.
State news agency IRNA said the three were hanged in public early
Saturday in Zahedan, near the mosque where the bombing killed 25 people
two days earlier.
Local judiciary official Ebrahim Hamidi said the three (Haji Nouti Zehi, Gholam Rasoul Shahoo Zehi, and Zabihollah Naroui) were convicted of supplying the explosives used in the blast.
Hamidi said the men had actually been arrested before the attack, and
confessed to bringing the explosives into Iran and "giving them to the
main person behind the bombing." He added the men had also been
involved in other attacks, including a 2006 bus bombing.
Iranian media reported Iran's foreign ministry summoned Pakistani
Ambassador Mohammad Bakhshi Abbasi after a Sunni Muslim militant group,
Jundallah, claimed responsibility for the Zahedan attack on the Shi'ite
mosque.
Sunni militants from Jundallah ("God's Brigade") are
believed to have launched a similar attack in Zahedan in 2007, and
security forces and drug smugglers also have clashed in that area,
which borders Pakistan.
Friday, U.S. officials rejected Iranian allegations that the United
States and Israel engineered the suicide-bomb attack, which took place
near Iran's border with Pakistan and Afghanistan.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs condemned the attack in a statement, saying "no cause justifies terrorism."
Iran's interior minister (Sadeq Mahsouli) said in an official statement (posted on the Internet Friday) that
"those who committed the Thursday bombing are neither Shi'ite nor
Sunni. They are Americans and Israelis." He cited no evidence for his
charges.