Explosions in Tehran and southern Iran killed at least nine people and injured 70 on Sunday in attacks apparently aimed at disrupting this week’s presidential elections.
A small bomb concealed in a rubbish container exploded in central Tehran, killing at least one person and wounding three, officials said.
The four other blasts, the deadliest to strike the country in more than a decade, took place in the city of Ahvaz, in mainly Arab Khuzestan, a volatile province which was the scene of unrest earlier this year.
Iranian authorities said the dead included at least four women, while children were among the injured. Eight policemen were also hurt.
One of the bombs targeted the Khuzestan governor’s office. Two others exploded at local government departments. A fourth ripped through a housing complex for state media employees while bomb disposal experts were trying to defuse it.
State television showed heavily damaged buildings and the ground stained with blood. The blasts left a trail of wrecked cars and shattered windows.
The attacks come five days before Iranians vote in Friday’s presidential elections. The Popular Democratic Front of Ahvaz, which favours independence for Khuzestan, said it was not responsible.
However, government officials said the incidents were designed to depress turnout in Khuzestan, where Arab separatist sentiment has been running high.
”Those behind the blasts want to endanger the country’s sovereignty ahead of the elections,” Gholamreza Shariati, Khuzestan’s deputy governor for security affairs, told state television. ”They want to harm the system, but the people’s desire to vote will become stronger in such conditions.”
Officials in Iran’s Islamic regime have stressed the importance of a high turnout to bolster the country’s democratic credentials in the face of American and European pressure for it to abandon its nuclear programme.
Polls show the former president, Hashemi Akbar Rafsanjani, with a strong lead but well short of the 50% needed to win outright and avoid a run-off against his nearest challenger in the eight-man field.
However, the New York-based Human Rights Watch on Sunday called the elections ”pre-cooked”.
”These elections are neither free nor fair,” said Joe Stork, deputy director of the group’s Middle East division. ”Iranians cannot vote for candidates who represent alternative viewpoints from those of the ruling elite.”
Sunday’s bomb blasts appeared calculated to generate the maximum attention at a time when many international journalists are inside Iran to cover the election.
In April, Iran expelled the Arab satellite television station al-Jazeera, accusing it of stirring up unrest in Khuzestan following demonstrations and rioting.
The Iranian authorities acknowledged that five people died and around 400 were arrested during the unrest, which was provoked by the circulation of a letter — allegedly written by a former vice president — purportedly disclosing plans to dilute Khuzestan’s Arab make-up by resettling other ethnic groups in the province. Iran insisted the letter was a forgery.
However, Yousef Azizi Banitotorfi, a leading Arab rights campaigner, said at the time that the true death toll was around 60. He was subsequently arrested and detained in Tehran’s Evin prison, where several prominent political prisoners are held.
Khuzestan is home to the vast majority of the country’s ethnic Arabs, who make up 3% of Iran’s population. Rights campaigners complain that despite Arabs being the majority group, virtually all of Khuzestan’s senior government posts are held by non-Arabs. They are also angry that most officially approved newspapers and television broadcasts in the province are in Persian rather than Arabic.
Khuzestan is considered economically and strategically sensitive by the Iranian authorities because it is the site of the nation’s oil reserves.
The 1980 invasion of Iran by Iraq was staged through Khuzestan. During the subsequent eight-year war, Saddam Hussein appealed to the Arab sympathies of the local population, which nevertheless remained largely loyal to Iran. – Guardian Unlimited Â