This attempted attack was further evidence that the Jundollah movement is not dead as the regime has claimed.
The authorities said suspicious guards stopped the man from entering the mosque. They said the man then ran away and exploded his vest some distance from the mosque, killing himself and two nearby members of the Basij. Deputy Interior Minister Ali Abdollahi indicated the bomber ignited the vest when the pursuing Basijis caught up with him. Six bystanders were injured.
An attack by two suicide bombers on the same Imam Hossaini mosque in December 2010 killed 39 worshippers.
Two days after the latest attack effort at the mosque, Iran’s Judiciary announced the execution by hanging of two men convicted of helping plot that 2010 bombing.
A third Jundollah member was also hanged. He was convicted of involvement in the 2010 bombing of a mosque in Zahedan that killed 28 people.
The Islamic Republic says Jundollah is funded and trained by the United States and linked to Al-Qaeda. Jundollah is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States.
Jundollah has been noted for especially bloody attacks since 2005. It has largely targeted officials of the government, but has also killed ordinary Shiite civilians on the highways and in mosques.
In one of its more gruesome acts, it set up a roadblock on a highway, in May 2006 stopping cars and killing all the occupants except for a 12-year-old boy it left alive to describe what Jundollah had done.
The leader of Jundollah, Abdolmalek Rigi, was captured in February 2010. He was on a commercial flight flying from Dubai over Iran to Kyrgyzstan when Iran ordered the flight to land. Rigi was taken off the plane and executed a few months later.
The government proclaimed that with his execution Jundollah was no longer a threat. But just days later, Jundollah carried out a bombing that killed dozens.
The December 2010 bombing in Chabahar was its last big event. Nothing was heard from the group through much of 2011, but late that year the government began claiming assorted arrests and ambushes of Jundollah members, indicating it was trying to launch attacks.
Then two Basijis were shot dead in December 2011 and a Sunni cleric was murdered in February 2012 in what appeared to be Jundollah attacks.
General Hossain Zolfaqari, commander of Iran’s Border Guard forces, last week said his troops had foiled more than five efforts to mount terror attacks across the border in the last eight months.
Last week’s targeting of the Chabahar mosque would appear to be first mass casualty plot to get near success in two years.
Jundollah has been less active and less effective than when Rigi was alive, but it has proven false the government’s claim to have eliminated the group.