Fourteen Iranian security personnel, including Revolutionary Guards intelligence officers, were yesterday abducted on the volatile southeastern border with Pakistan, state media reported.
The guards blamed “terrorist groups that are guided and supported by foreign forces” for the abductions and demanded action by the Pakistani authorities to help locate the captive troops.
The force was “abducted between 4am and 5am in the Lulakdan area of the border by a terrorist group,” the Islamic Republic News Agency said.
Lulakdan is a small village 150km southeast of Zahedan, capital of the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan.
The abduction was carried out by “infiltrators linked to anti-revolutionary groups,” the guards said in a statement on their Web site.
“Members of terrorist groups that are guided and supported by foreign forces carried this out through deceiving and bribing infiltrators,” they added.
They said operations were under way to find those responsible and called on Pakistan “to stamp out terrorists that are stationed near the border” and help recover the captive Iranians.
The 14 were involved in “a security operation” and included two members of the elite Revolutionary Guards intelligence unit, seven Basij militiamen and five regular border guards, state-owned news Web site Young Journalists’ Club said.
The report was deleted from the YJC Web site shortly afterwards.
The province has long been a flashpoint, with Baluchi separatists and jihadists based in Pakistan regularly attacking Iranian security posts.
On Sept. 28, the guards said they had killed four militants who had slipped across the border.
Sistan-Baluchistan has a large, mainly Sunni Muslim ethnic Baluchi community that straddles the border.
Sunni extremist group Jundallah (Soldiers of God) launched a bloody insurgency in the province in 2000 targeting the security forces and officials of Iran’s Shiite-dominated government.
The campaign peaked with a spate of deadly attacks from 2007 — including twin suicide bombings against a Shiite mosque that killed 28 people — but abated after the group’s leader was killed in mid-2010.
In 2012, Jundullah members formed a successor organization called Jaish al-Adl (Army of Justice), which has carried out a spate of attacks on the security forces.
Iran has alleged that the group has received support from the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia, with the complicity of Pakistan.
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
Indonesia’s parliament yesterday amended a law to allow members of the military to hold more government roles, despite criticisms that it would expand the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs. The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defense in a country long influenced by its armed forces. The amendment has sparked fears of a return to the era of former Indonesian president Suharto, who ex-general Prabowo once served and who used military figures to crack down on dissent. “Now it’s the time for us to ask the
The central Dutch city of Utrecht has installed a “fish doorbell” on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds. The idea is simple: An underwater camera at Utrecht’s Weerdsluis lock sends live footage to a Web site. When somebody watching the site sees a fish, they can click a button that sends a screenshot to organizers. When they see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through. Now in its fifth year, the
‘INCREDIBLY TROUBLESOME’: Hours after a judge questioned the legality of invoking a wartime power to deport immigrants, the president denied signing the proclamation The US on Friday said it was terminating the legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, giving them weeks to leave the country. US President Donald Trump has pledged to carry out the largest deportation campaign in US history and curb immigration, mainly from Latin American nations. The order affects about 532,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who came to the US under a scheme launched in October 2022 by Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, and expanded in January the following year. They would lose their legal protection 30 days after the US Department of Homeland Security’s order is published in the Federal
RSS