A suicide bomber killed five senior commanders of the elite Revolutionary Guard and at least 26 others in an area of southeastern Iran that has been at the center of a simmering Sunni insurgency, state media reported. An Iranian prosecutor said Jundallah headed by Abdolmalek Rigi has claimed responsibility for the attack. “So far no one has been arrested, but terrorist Malek Rigi has accepted the responsibility for this terrorist attack,” Mohammad Marziah, prosecutor of Zahedan, the capital of the Sistan-Balochistan province where the attack took place, was quoted as saying. The official IRNA news agency said that the dead included the deputy commander of the Guard's ground force, Gen. Noor Ali Shooshtari, as well as a chief provincial Guard commander for the area, Rajab Ali Mohammadzadeh. The other dead were Guard members or local tribal leaders. More than two dozen others were wounded. The commanders were inside a car on their way to a meeting with the local tribal leaders in the Pishin district near Iran's border with Pakistan when an attacker with explosives blew himself up, IRNA said. Iran's state-owned English language TV channel, Press TV, said there were two simultaneous explosions: one at the meeting and another targeting an additional convoy of Guards on their way to the gathering. Jundallah accuses Iran's Shiite-dominated government of persecution and has carried out attacks against the Revolutionary Guard and Shiite targets in the southeast. That campaign is one of several ethnic and religious small
