Iran blames US for preelection violence
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TEHRAN - Preelection tensions rose in Iran's religiously and ethnically mixed southeast yesterday as gunmen opened fire on the president's campaign office and a radical group claimed responsibility for the bombing of a mosque the previous night that killed up to 23 people and injured scores of others.
Iranian authorities blamed the United States for the violence.
"The hands of America and Israel were undoubtedly involved in this incident," prayer leader Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami told supporters in Tehran, referring to the bombing Thursday. "Although Wahhabis and the infidel and evil Salafists were an accomplice to the crime, they were being led from somewhere else."
Wahhabi and Salafi are puritanical schools of Sunni Islam rooted in Saudi Arabia that inspire Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorist network, as well as the Taliban and other groups that denounce Iran's dominant Shi'ite Islam.
Khatami is a staunch hard-liner unrelated to former President Mohammad Khatami, who is a moderate.
The gunmen who opened fire on the reelection campaign headquarters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the provincial capital of Zahedan stormed in and ripped up campaign literature and injured as many as three people, according to Iranian news agencies.
Hours earlier, the Al Qaeda-linked group Jundallah, which draws support from Iran's ethnic Baluch minority, claimed responsibility for bombing the mosque on a Shi'ite religious holiday in a phone call to the Al-Arabiya satellite news channel.
The caller said the bomb's victims were hard-line progovernment militiamen discussing the June 12 elections.
