TEHRAN, March 17: Afghan bandits with links to US and British security services have killed 22 people in Iran and seized an unknown number of others in an ambush that also left a senior official critically wounded, officials said on Friday.

Police said “a group of armed bandits who crossed the Afghanistan border killed 21 people and injured another seven innocent people driving in their vehicles” between the border city of Zabol and Zahedan, the provincial capital of Sistan-Balochistan.

The southeastern province’s deputy governor general for security, Mohsen Sadeghi, later raised the death toll to 22 and said that, “according to the reports we got, one of the seven injured people is in a critical condition.”

A source in the interior ministry said: “Hossein Ali Nouri, the governor of Zahedan and his deputy have been critically wounded and both are in intensive care in hospital.”

According to some Iranian news agencies, Nouri and his deputy were shot several times in the chest and abdomen.

The source added that “apparently a number of people have been taken hostage.—AFP