December 21, 2018
In an unusual (for Iran) suicide car bombing, a man blew himself and two police officers to death at the entrance to the police compound in Chabahar, in the far southeastern corner of Iran.
The man had driven up to the gate to the compound but was not allowed in. Some news reports said the guards began shooting at him, though reports didn’t explain why. Then the driver detonated the bomb.
State TV broadcast a video showing an immense cloud of smoke from the December 6 bombing as it hovered over the bomb site, indicating it was a large bomb.
An obscure jihadi group named Ansar al-Furqan claimed responsibility. The organization is Sunni, but not Baluchi. Its only other claimed terrorist act was one year ago when it claimed to have blown up a pipeline in Khuzestan, on the other side of the country.
In June, the Pasdaran said it had killed the group’s leader, Molavi Jalil Qanbar-Zehi, during a shootout in a mountainous region of Sistan Va Baluchestan province.
This was the third effort at a major terrorist act in the last 18 months in Iran, though the small Chabahar death toll was not probably what the planners had hoped for.
The first major attack was in June 2017 when a half-dozen terrorists dispatched by the Islamic State simultaneously attacked the shrine to Ayatollah Khomeini south of Tehran and the Majlis office building in the middle of the city. Those two attacks left 17 people dead in addition to all five terrorists.
Then last June a group of five men attacked a military parade in Ahvaz, killing 24 people, half Pasdaran in the parade and half bystanders watching the parade.
The Chabahar hospital said it treated 43 people injured in the police headquarters bombing, 10 of them police officers and the rest civilians walking in the street in front of the police headquarters or working in adjacent shops. It said 12 of the injured were kept overnight, with three of them in intensive care.
Two days after the bombing, the police said they had arrested four people for involvement. The next day, they said another six had been arrested. These claims need to be taken with a grain of salt. After a major crime, it is normal for the police to claim a number of arrests to show they are efficient and on the job. Often, nothing more is ever heard of the supposed arrestees.
Eight years ago, in December 2010, a bomber with a suicide vest entered a mosque in Chabahar and detonated it, killing 41 people and injuring 90. The port city has not been a target of terror attacks except for these two major ones.