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TEHRAN, May 14: Armed bandits operating on a busy highway in Iran’s restive southeast have killed 12 people and injured one other, official media reported on Sunday.
State television said after the gruesome execution-style killings, which took place late Saturday outside the earthquake-destroyed town of Bam in Kerman province, police managed to track down the bandits and kill six of them.
“Six of the bandits were killed in a shootout after we caught them in an area between Kerman and Sistan-Balochistan,” Abolqasem Nasrollahi, a deputy of Kerman province’s governor-general, told state television.
He said a number of weapons were seized and three vehicles destroyed.
An eyewitness was earlier quoted on the state news agency IRNA as saying three to five armed men stopped vehicles some 35km from Bam.
Local Iranian officials said the victims were handcuffed and shot in cold blood on the side of the road and dumped in a trench. Police did not give a possible motive.
Southeastern Iran is a major thoroughfare for narcotics smuggled from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Europe and the Middle East.
RESPONSIBILITY CLAIMED: A hardline Sunni militant group has claimed responsibility for the execution-style murders of 12 people in Iran’s restive southeast, a police official was quoted as saying Sunday.
“Terrorist elements from the so-called Jundallah group, headed by Abdolmalek Rigi, claimed responsibility for the killing of 12 innocent Iranians by phoning us,” Iranian police commander Askandar Moemeni told the ISNA news agency. Only a young boy was spared, but he was traumatised after witnessing the shootings.—AFP
