At least three killed in bomb attacks in oil-rich Iranian city

AFP: At least three people were killed Sunday when a series of bomb attacks targetting public buildings rocked Iran’s restive southwestern city of Ahvaz, an interior ministry official said.
Interior ministry spokesman Jahanbaksh Khanjani told AFP there were four explosions and that “three or four people” were killed in Ahvaz, the capital of oil-rich Khuzestan province and an ethnic-Arab majority city close to the border with Iraq.
AFP

TEHRAN – At least three people were killed Sunday when a series of bomb attacks targetting public buildings rocked Iran’s restive southwestern city of Ahvaz, an interior ministry official said.

Interior ministry spokesman Jahanbaksh Khanjani told AFP there were four explosions and that “three or four people” were killed in Ahvaz, the capital of oil-rich Khuzestan province and an ethnic-Arab majority city close to the border with Iraq.

State media reported three “strong explosions”, which came just days before the Islamic republic is due to go to the polls on June 17 to elect a new president.

Ahvaz was rocked by several days of ethnic unrest in April, although it was not clear if the bombings were related to that violence.

Khanjani said at least one of the attacks was a car bomb attack outside the Ahvaz prefecture.

Quoted by the official news agency IRNA, the interior ministry’s security affairs director Amir Hossein Motahar said there were three explosions — one outside the prefecture, another outside a housing ministry building and another outside the home of the director of state television operations in Ahvaz.

Motahar said one of the bombs exploded while officials were trying to defuse it.