(Tehran) At least 15 people were killed on Wednesday in the southern city of Shiraz in an attack in the main Shiite Muslim shrine in southern Iran and claimed by the jihadist group Islamic State (IS).
Posted at 12:06 a.m.
President Ebrahim Raisi accused in a statement “the enemies of Iran” who seek “to divide the united ranks of the nation […] by violence and terror, and promised a severe response from the security forces.
The attack, among the deadliest in recent years in Iran, was perpetrated “during evening prayers” in the Shahcheragh mausoleum, local governor Mohammad-Hadi Imanieh told state television.
According to him, the assailant “fired blindly on the faithful”, in the most important shrine in southern Iran, which houses the tomb of Ahmad, brother of one of the most revered figures of Shiism, l Imam Reza died in 818.
“Only one terrorist was involved in this attack,” said the head of the local judicial authority, Kazem Moussavi, on television, which reported “at least 15 dead and 19 injured”.
The author, “affiliated with takfiri groups, was arrested”, added the television in reference to jihadist or radical Sunni Islamist groups.
The television said that “the security forces injured the assailant” who “is currently undergoing surgery in hospital”.
According to the IS propaganda outlet, a member of the Sunni jihadist group opened fire on worshipers at the Shahcheragh shrine, “killing at least 20 Shiites and wounding dozens more”.
A witness told Iran’s official Irna news agency that he had “heard cries of women at the time of the call to evening prayer”, adding that “the aggressor entered and shot at the shrine”.
Second deadly attack
Footage released by state media shows a bloodbath and several dead bodies covered in sheets.
The Irna agency broadcast images of a little boy on a stretcher in particular, but also the blurred photo of a woman lying on the ground holding a small child near a man leaning against a wall, with visible blood marks.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres strongly condemned “the terrorist attack,” his spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in a statement. “Such acts targeting religious sites are particularly heinous,” he added.
The attack came as Iran has for nearly six weeks been hit by a wave of protests sparked by the September 16 death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd who died three days after her arrest by the morality police in Tehran, a protest on a scale that the country had not seen for three years.
This is the second deadly attack perpetrated in 2022 against a Shiite place of worship in Iran, a country of some 83 million inhabitants, where Shiism has been the state religion since the 16th century.e century.
At the beginning of April, a 21-year-old national of “Uzbek” origin stabbed to death two Shiite clerics and injured a third in the courtyard of the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, Iran’s second city. Accused of “moharebeh” (being an “enemy of God” in Persian), the assailant was hanged in June in the same city, according to the Judicial Authority.
The Shiraz attack is the deadliest in Iran since February 2019, when 27 members of the Revolutionary Guards, the ideological army of the Islamic Republic, died in an attack claimed by a Sunni extremist group in the south-east of the country.
In 2018, an attack claimed the lives of 24 people in Ahvaz, the capital of Khuzestan (southwest). It was claimed by IS but Tehran blamed the ‘Popular and Democratic Front of Arabs of Ahvaz’ (PFDAA), a separatist group which denied any involvement.
ISIS claimed responsibility for its first attack in Iran on June 7, 2017. Gunmen and suicide bombers then attacked Tehran’s parliament and the mausoleum of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini, killing 17 people.