AHVAZ (Iran), June 12: Bomb blasts in Tehran and the southwestern oil city of Ahvaz killed at least eight people and wounded 73 on Sunday, five days before Iran’s presidential election. Four bombs in Ahvaz, capital of the partly Arabic-speaking province of Khuzestan, targeted government buildings.

“We had six martyrs and 70 wounded,” Ahvaz governor Mohammad Jaafar Sarrami told Reuters.

The Popular Democratic Front of Ahvaz, which is campaigning for an independent Khuzestan, denied it was behind the attacks, but said another Arab group calling itself the Ahvazi Revolutionary Martyrs’ Brigades had claimed responsibility.

Hours later, a small bomb concealed in a rubbish container exploded in central Tehran, killing at least one person.

“There is one dead and three wounded,” said Interior Ministry spokesman Jahanbakhsh Khanjani.

Police cordoned off the area where the blast occurred in a street off Imam Hossein square in a crowded commercial district.

Reuters photographer Raheb Homavandi said he had seen the body of the victim, a man. Ambulances rushed to the scene.

There was no immediate word on who had carried out the Tehran bombing or whether it was linked to the attacks in Ahvaz.

Gholamreza Shariati, deputy governor of Khuzestan province, where five people were killed in ethnic unrest in April, said earlier that women and children were among the bomb casualties in Ahvaz.

The bombs targeted the governor’s office in Ahvaz, 550 km southwest of Tehran, as well as two local government departments and a housing complex for state media employees.

A pool of blood stained the floor of a waiting room at the governor’s office, where the explosion destroyed ceilings and smashed windows. The mangled wreckage of a car which might have carried the bomb lay in the street nearby.

Police sealed off the area, littered with broken glass.—Reuter