11 police killed in jihadist attack in Iran

At least 11 police officers have been killed in southeastern Iran in one of the deadliest attacks claimed by a jihadist group active in the area bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The assailants attacked the police headquarters in the city of Rask, in the troubled province of Sistan-Baluchestan, at around midnight on Thursday.

"In the terrorist attack 11 policemen were killed and others injured," the province's deputy governor, Alireza Marhamati, said on television.

"The officers of the attacked military barracks defended themselves bravely. They wounded and killed some of the attackers," he was quoted as saying by the official Irna news agency.

Mehdi Shamsabadi, the prosecutor of Zahedan, the regional capital, announced that seven policemen had been wounded, some of them in a "critical condition".

The Sistan-Baluchestan police commander was in Rask on Friday morning, where "the situation is under control", Irna reported.

The Isna news agency showed pictures of a helicopter searching for the attackers over the mountains on the Iran-Pakistan border.

Attacks and kidnappings

The vast desert region of Sistan-Baluchestan is the scene of recurrent clashes between law enforcement on the one hand, and drug traffickers, Baloch minority rebels and radical Sunni groups on the other.

The province is one of the poorest in Iran and is home to a majority of the Baloch ethnic minority, who adhere to Sunni Islam rather than the predominant Shia branch of Islam in Iran.

In a brief statement posted on its Telegram channel, the Baloch jihadist group Jaish al-Adl ("Army of Justice" in Arabic) claimed responsibility for the attack.

The group was formed in 2012 by former members of a radical Sunni organisation that led a bloody rebellion in the region until 2010.

It is best known for claiming responsibility for the kidnapping of 12 Iranian policemen and soldiers in the same province in October 2018.

In July, two policemen were killed in an attack, claimed by the group, on a police station in Zahedan.

The group accused the attacked police station in Rask of being "one of the main perpetrators of the Bloody Friday tragedy", a reference to the violence in September 2022.

At the time, the city of Zahedan was the scene of several days of deadly violence triggered by the alleged rape of a teenage girl by a police officer.

The attacked police station is located near the Makki mosque, which is run by the influential religious leader of the province's Sunni Muslim minority, Molavi Abdol Hamid.

In a statement, he condemned "any manifestation of violence", stressing that he did not know who was behind the attack.