TEHRAN, Iran — A suicide bomber killed a local police officer and wounded another in a southern Iranian port city, home to a large Sunni Muslim community, local media said Sunday.
The hardline Javan Daily, a newspaper close to the country’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said the attacker stopped Capt. Mojtaba Shahid’s car Saturday evening in Bandar Lengeh in the province of Hormozgan before detonating his vest.
Shahid’s deputy, who was also in the car, has been hospitalized in critical condition, the paper reported, describing the attack as an act of terrorism.
The city, some 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) south of the capital Tehran, has no recent history of terrorism.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but some local news outlets claimed Ansar al-Furqan, an al-Qaeda-linked Sunni armed group, was behind it.
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The attack came days ahead of the anniversary of two suicide bombings on January 3 in which nearly 100 people were killed at a memorial in southeastern Iran for top IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated in Iraq in 2020 by a US drone. Islamic State claimed those two suicide bombings.
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