A Sunday August 13 shooting at a Shia shrine in southern Iran killed one person and injured eight others, state media reported, revising down a previous death toll of four. The attack comes less than a year after a similar attack on the same holy site, the mausoleum of Shah-Tcheragh in Shiraz, the capital of Fars province.
“One person was killed and eight others injured in the attack”, reported the official IRNA news agency, quoting Esmail Ghezel Sofala, the deputy governor of Fars. The wounded “were taken to medical centers for treatment”, said the media. In a first assessment, the official media had counted four dead in this attack which was not immediately claimed.
The commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards (the ideological army of the Islamic Republic) in Fars province, Yadollah Bouali, told state television that the attack involved one person, who had been arrested. “A terrorist entered the sanctuary and opened fire with a riflesaid Mr. Bouali. Several pilgrims who were nearby were injured. » Footage broadcast by state television showed ambulances rushing to the site of the attack.
Shah-Tcheragh, a very important Shiite place of pilgrimage in Iran, had already been the target of an attack which left thirteen dead on October 26, 2022. The mausoleum houses the tomb of Ahmad, brother of Imam Reza, the eighth Shia imam. Two men involved in the 2022 attack claimed by the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) were hanged in public in Shiraz on July 8.
Twenty-six “terrorists” arrested in November 2022
The two men were found guilty of “corruption on earth”, “armed rebellion” and “undermining national security”, as well as “conspiring against the security of the country”. They were also charged with belonging to the IS group and “conspiracy against the security of the country”.
Mizan Online, the official news agency of the judiciary, had identified the two executed men as Mohammad Ramez Rashidi and Naeem Hashem Qatali, without revealing their nationality. In November 2022, authorities said that twenty-six “takfiri terrorists” from Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and Tajikistan had been arrested in connection with the attack.
In Iran, a country with a Shiite majority, the term “takfiri” generally refers to jihadists or supporters of radical Sunni Islam. IS claimed its first attack in Iran in 2017, when gunmen and suicide bombers attacked the parliament building in Tehran and the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, killing 17 people and injuring dozens.
The attack on the shrine in October 2022 came more than a month after protests began across the country over the death in custody of a young Iranian Kurd. Mahsa Amini, 22, died three days after she was arrested by vice police who accused her of breaking the strict dress code requiring women to wear the veil in the Islamic Republic. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said at the time that the “riots”a term used by the authorities to refer to the demonstrations, opened the way to attacks “terrorists”.