TEHRAN, Iran — A gunman opened hearth Sunday night time at a outstanding shrine in southern Iran, killing one individual and wounding eight others in an assault that adopted one other assault there months earlier, authorities stated.
Officials provided no quick motive for the assault within the metropolis of Shiraz at Shah Cheragh, which pulls Shiite pilgrims to its domed mosque and the tomb of a outstanding member of the religion from its earliest days.
However, Iran has confronted assaults prior to now from the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State group, who view Shiites as heretics. Iran additionally faces lingering unrest and financial turmoil amid tensions with the West.
Iran’s state-run IRNA information company quoted Ismail Qezelsofla, a deputy governor for safety within the nation’s Fars province, as providing the casualty toll.
Fars province Gov. Mohammad Hadi Imanieh informed Iranian state tv {that a} single gunman carried out the assault and later was detained by safety forces. He didn’t supply any motive for the assault in his transient feedback.
Footage after the assault confirmed safety forces encompass one entrance to the then-deserted courtyard of Shah Cheragh at sundown. Ambulances later took away the wounded as safety forces and authorities officers reached the shrine.
Shah Cheragh is certainly one of Iran’s high 5 Shiite shrines. It attracts pilgrims to Shiraz, which is a few 675 kilometers (420 miles) south of Iran’s capital, Tehran.
No group instantly claimed duty for the assault.
The assault Sunday night time comes after an October 2022 assault on the identical shrine killed 13 individuals and wounded dozens of others. The Islamic State group claimed the assault, which Iran stated had been carried out by a person from Tajikistan, who later died in a hospital after succumbing to accidents he suffered whereas being detained by safety forces.
Iran has backed Syria’s embattled Bashar Assad throughout his nation’s civil conflict. It additionally fought Islamic State fighters each there and in Iraq.
The worst assault from Islamic State militants in Iran got here in a June 2017 assault that killed not less than 18 individuals and wounded greater than 50 in Tehran as its gunmen stormed parliament and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s mausoleum. Khomeini led the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled the Western-backed shah to grow to be Iran’s first supreme chief till his loss of life in 1989.
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Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
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