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14 Iran security personnel seized on Pakistan border
TEHRAN, Oct 16, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Fourteen Iranian security personnel,
including Revolutionary Guards intelligence officers, were abducted on the
volatile southeastern border with Pakistan on Tuesday, state media reported.
The border guards were “abducted between 4 am and 5 am in the Lulakdan area
of the border by a terrorist group,” the official IRNA news agency said.
Lulakdan is a small village 150 kilometres (about 90 miles) southeast of
Zahedan, capital of the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan.
The 14 were involved in “a security operation” and included two members of
the elite Revolutionary Guards intelligence unit, seven Basij militiamen and
five regular border guards, the Young Journalists’ Club (YJC), a state-owned
news website, said.
The report was deleted from the YJC website shortly afterwards.
The province has long been a flashpoint, with Baluchi separatists and
jihadists based in Pakistan regularly attacking Iranian security posts.
On September 28, the Guards said they had killed four militants who had
slipped across the border.
Sistan-Baluchistan has a large, mainly Sunni Muslim ethnic Baluchi
community which straddles the border.
Sunni extremist group Jundallah (Soldiers of God) launched a bloody
insurgency in the province in 2000 targeting the security forces and
officials of Iran’s Shiite-dominated government.
The campaign peaked with a spate of deadly attacks from 2007 — including
twin suicide bombings against a Shiite mosque that killed 28 people — but
abated after the group’s leader was killed in mid-2010.
In 2012, Jundullah members formed a successor organisation called Jaish al-
Adl (Army of Justice), which has carried out a spate of attacks on the
security forces.
Iran has alleged that the group has received support from the US, Israel
and Saudi Arabia, with the complicity of Pakistan.
BSS/AFP/MSY/1355 hrs