Iran dresses down European envoys over military parade attack

Iran summoned diplomats from Denmark, the Netherlands and Britain over an attack on an army parade which killed at least 29 people near the Iraqi border, state-run media said on Sunday.

The Dutch and Danish ambassadors and the British charge d’affaires were “informed of Iran’s strong protests over their respective countries’ hosting of some members of the terrorist group” which carried out the attack, official news agency IRNA said.

Iran called on Denmark and the Netherlands to extradite the attack’s “perpetrators and their accomplices” to stand trial in the Middle Eastern country, IRNA said, citing foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi.

“It is not acceptable that the European Union does not blacklist members of these terrorist groups as long as they do not perpetrate a crime on… European soil,” Qasemi was quoted as saying.

Initially, authorities described the assailants as “takfiri gunmen,” a term previously used to describe the Islamic State group. Iran has been deeply involved in the fight against IS in Iraq and has aided embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad in his country’s long war.

But later, state media and government officials seemed to come to the consensus that Arab separatists in the region were responsible. The separatists accuse Iran’s Persian-dominated government of discriminating against its ethnic Arab minority, though an Ahvazi Arab, Gen. Ali Shamkhani, serves as the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council.

Iran has blamed its Mideast archrival, the Sunni kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for funding Arab separatists’ activity. State media in Saudi Arabia did not immediately acknowledge the attack, though a Saudi-linked, Farsi-language satellite channel based in the United Kingdom immediately carried an interview with an Ahvazi activist claiming Saturday’s attack.

The British charge d’affaires, summoned in the ambassador’s absence, was told it was unacceptable “that the spokesman for the Al-Ahvazi terrorist group was allowed to claim responsibility of the attack through a London-based TV network,” according to the news agency.

Hamid Baeidinejad, Iran’s ambassador to the UK, called the channel’s decision a “heinous act” in a post on Twitter and said his country would file a complaint with British authorities over the broadcast.

Yacoub Hor al-Tostari, a spokesman for the Arab Struggle Movement to Liberate Ahvaz, later told the AP that members of an umbrella group of Ahvazi activists his organization leads carried out the attack.

The attack undermined the Iranian government “on the day it wants to give a message to the world that it is powerful and in control,” al-Tostari said. To bolster his claim, he gave details about one of the attackers that the AP could not immediately verify.

The Islamic State group also claimed responsibility for the attack in a message on its Amaaq news agency, but provided no evidence it carried out the assault. They also initially wrongly said the Ahvaz attack targeted Rouhani, who was in Tehran. The group has made a string of false claims in the wake of major defeats in Iraq and Syria.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani has vowed a “crushing” response to the attack in the province of Khuzestan, which borders Iraq and has a large ethnic Arab community.