Bomb kills 10 at Iranian military parade

The attack, in a region where bombings are relatively rare, occurred as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was attending the opening of the UN General Assembly in New York.

The bomb was reported to have exploded about 50 yards from the main parade in the Kurdish-majority city of Mahabad, in West Azerbaijan Province. State TV showed uniformed soldiers parading past senior military officers on a podium to the sound of marching music — the scene suddenly jarred by an explosion. News reports said the bomb had been planted in trees; some reports said it had been set off by a timer.

At least two of the dead were reported to be wives of regional military commanders.

No group immediately took responsibility for the attack.

The province’s governor, Vahid Jalalzadeh, blamed opponents of the 1979 Islamic revolution, who “have always carried out such brutal acts to take revenge on the people,’’ state-controlled Press TV reported on its website. The Associated Press quoted a provincial official as telling the semiofficial Mehr news agency that the explosion was probably the work of Kurdish separatists.

At least one group of Kurdish nationalists, known as PJAK, is known to operate in the Mahabad region, close to the border with Iraq and Turkey, both of which have sizable Kurdish minorities. In Turkey, in particular, authorities have been fighting a decades-long campaign against Kurdish separatists that has claimed some 40,000 lives. The Iranian Kurdish movement is said by Iran experts to have close ties to the insurgent Kurdish Workers’ Party in Turkey, which called off a 14-month cease-fire in June, prompting a series of attacks on Turkish security forces.

Iran’s government has long feared that the country’s restive Kurdish population will join Kurds in Iraq and Turkey to try to form a Kurdish nation. Iran’s Kurds are mostly Sunni and therefore a religious minority, as well, and they say the government discriminates against them.

But violence has been rare.