All suspects allegedly involved in planning and carrying out the Kerman terror attacks have been arrested, Kerman region Prosecutor Mahdi Bakhshi has announced.
“32 people have been arrested in [connection with the] Kerman crime case and are going through preliminary interrogations,” Bakhshi told local media late Saturday.
This reportedly includes two other would-be suicide attackers who were exposed “before the assignment of tasks in the ceremony.”
Along with the two bombs that went off in Kerman, 16 additional explosive devices were discovered throughout the province by the security services and disarmed, the prosecutor said. In addition, he said, “over the recent months, as many as 23 Daesh* terrorists ready to carry out suicide attacks have been arrested across Kerman province.”
Bakhshi did not elaborate on the identities of the Kerman suicide attackers, but reiterated that one of them was a Tajik national.
Daesh claimed responsibility for the Kerman bombings, with Esmail Qaani, the current commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force, accusing the perpetrators of being “supplied by the United States and the Zionist regime,” i.e. Israel. Iranian officials and military officials including Soleimani prior to his death have repeatedly accused the US and Israel of “sponsoring” and otherwise supporting Daesh. The two countries have vocally denied these allegations, with a US State Department spokesman saying this week accusations of US involvement in the Kerman attack were “ridiculous.”
US officials have told Western media that Daesh’s Afghanistan branch, ISIS-K, was responsible for the Kerman bombing. Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities have repeatedly accused Washington of conceiving and training ISIS-K in a bid to destabilize Afghanistan.
In the aftermath of the Kerman attacks, Iran ordered border security along its frontiers with Afghanistan and Pakistan to be beefed up.
Iran played a decisive role in crushing Daesh during the terror group’s attempts to build a ‘caliphate’ in western Iraq and eastern Syria between 2014 and 2017, with Soleimani’s Quds Force advising Syrian and Lebanese Hezbollah militants fighting the terrorists in the west, and aiding the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces fighters drafted to help the regular Iraqi army in driving the terrorists from Iraqi territory in the east.
Soleimani and PMF deputy commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis were killed in a US drone strike in January 2020 in Baghdad, Iraq, while the Iranian commander was on a secret peace mission aimed at restoring ties with Saudi Arabia. Iran has repeatedly sought to take members of the Trump administration and Israeli officials allegedly involved in planning the attacks to international court, but INTERPOL has refused to accept the case, citing its “politicized” nature. Last month, a court in Tehran ordered the United States government and individuals and entities charged with conspiring to assassinate Soleimani to pay nearly $50 billion in compensation for “material, moral and punitive damages” in a lawsuit filed by over 3,300 Iranians.
* Also known as ISIS or ISIL, a terrorist group outlawed in Russia and many other countries.