Four Iranian policemen, ‘terrorist’ killed

TEHRAN: Four Iranian police officers and one “terrorist” have been killed in separate incidents in the strife-torn country, state media and the Revolutionary Guards said Sunday.

Iran has been rocked by more than seven weeks of nationwide protests over the death of 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini while in the custody of the Tehran morality police.

Amid the wider unrest, clashes have rocked Sistan-Baluchistan province, which borders Pakistan and Afghanistan, sparked by the alleged rape of a local teenage girl by a police chief. The four police officers were killed in Sistan-Baluchistan, official media said, without saying when, and blaming a personal dispute between police conscripts.

“The incident, at a traffic police station on the Iranshahr-Bampour highway, caused the martyrdom of the police officers,” regional police chief Major Alireza Sayyad told IRNA news agency.

Poverty-stricken Sistan-Baluchistan has long been a flashpoint for clashes with rebels from the Baluchi minority, Sunni Muslim extremist groups and drug smuggling gangs. On September 30 in Zahedan, the provincial capital, dozens of protesters and six members of the security forces were killed, according to the authorities.

In a separate incident, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said its forces had killed an “element hostile to the revolution” after an attack on one of their bases in Mahshahr, in the southwestern province of Khuzestan.

“The forces fired on two terrorists on motorbikes in order to protect the headquarters, killing one of them while steps were taken to identify and arrest the second person,” the IRGC said in a statement.