Iran in two weeks has killed five and injured at least nine.
Deputy Interior Minister for Security and Disciplinary Affairs Ali Abdollahi said two gunmen shot at a police car and station northwest of Azadi Square in Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan province.
Four police officers and one civilian were killed and at least nine others were injured, including five officers and four civilians.
No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack. Officials said only that the gunmen were members of “counter-revolutionary groups.” Clashes between Kurdish rebel groups and Iranian security forces are common in Kurdistan province. Several weeks earlier, four members of the outlawed leftist Kurdish group, Komala, were killed by Iranian security forces in the province. But most of the clashes these days involved the Party of Free Life in Kurdistan (PEJAK), an Iranian offshoot of the Turkish Kurdistan Workers party (PKK).
A senior police official, Ebrahim Kazeminejad, said after the Sanandaj attack that police chased down and killed two of those involved in drive-by shooting.
This attack follows a bombing two weeks earlier in Mahabad, a Kurdish majority city in West Azerbaijan province, which killed 12 and injured at least 80 during a military parade.
The Pasdaran have blamed just about everyone for the Mahabad bombing, Iraq’s Baath Party, the party of Saddam Hussein.
“During investigations after the terrorist bombing,… we found out that some of the former Baath Party elements, in particular two Baath officers and some [Iranian] counter-revolutionary elements, were behind the attack,” said Brigadier General Mohammad Pakpur, commander of the Pasdar Ground Forces.
According to Pakpur, foreign intelligence services also had a role in the attack. “The Israeli intelligence service [Mossad] and the US intelligence service [CIA] have control over the northern parts of Iraq and the support team behind the Mahabad terrorist attack,” Pakpur said.