Iran hanged the convicted leader of a Sunni Muslim rebel group yesterday for his involvement in attacks in the Islamic state, state television reported.
Predominantly Shiite Muslim Iran arrested Abdolmalek Rigi in February, four months after his Jundollah (God’s soldiers) group claimed a bombing that killed dozens of people, including senior officers of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards.
“Abdolmalek Rigi was hanged at dawn today ... he was convicted for many crimes like being behind many deadly attacks ... and killing dozens of innocent people,” state television said.
ETHNICITY
Iran grapples with ethnic and religious tension in Sistan-Baluchestan Province, where authorities have responded to attacks by Sunni rebels with a spate of hangings.
Rights groups and the West have condemned the hangings. A Tehran Revolutionary court sentenced Rigi to death and the Supreme Court upheld the sentence, the semi-official Fars news agency said, adding that Rigi was executed inside Tehran’s Evin prison in the presence of “the families of some of the victims.”
“Abdolmalek Rigi’s charges also included armed robbery, kidnapping, drug trafficking and the formation and leading of the terrorist Jundollah group,” Fars reported.
Iran said the Sunni group had links to Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda and accuses Pakistan, the UK and the US of supporting Jundollah to create instability in southeast Iran, where many of the country’s Sunni minority live.
The three countries deny the accusations.
Iran is at odds with the West over its nuclear program, which it says is aimed at generating power and not building bombs as the US, its European allies and Israel suspect.
“Jundollah was linked to members of foreign intelligence services, including members from America and the Zionist regime’s [Israel] intelligence services under the cover of NATO,” the official IRNA news agency quoted a court statement as saying.
VOTE SCANDAL
Opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi yesterday vowed to continue fighting the “vote scandal” that rocked Iran last year, a year to the day after the death of a young woman at a Tehran protest rally.
Karroubi’s latest salvo comes 12 months after a demonstration in the capital against the re-election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad led to the killing of 10 people, including Neda Agha-Soltan.
A cellphone video posted on the Internet showing the young woman bleeding to death in the street during the June 20 rally became the symbol of the uprising against Ahmadinejad’s re-election.
In an open letter to Iranians posted on his Sahamnews.org Web site, Karroubi declared that he would keep his pact with opposition supporters in continuing to reject Ahmadinejad’s government.
“Your stolen votes and the right which was unjustly taken away is a scandal which will not be wiped out at all,” the cleric said. “I once again declare in all honesty that I will be committed to my pact with you until the end.”
Hundreds of thousands of opposition supporters poured onto the streets of Tehran soon after the June presidential election result returned Ahmadinejad to office for a second term.
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