DUBAI: Iran’s official news agency said Monday that the gunman who killed 13 people at a major Shiite shrine last month was a citizen of Tajikistan.
The militant Daesh group has claimed responsibility for the Oct. 26 attack on Shah Cheragh in the city of Shiraz, one of Iran’s top five Shiite shrines. But the government has tried to blame the attack on the largely peaceful anti-government protests, without offering evidence.
Iran initially said 15 were killed in Shiraz but later revised the number to 13 over double-counting.
The report on IRNA identified the gunman as Sobhan Komrouni. He died in a hospital in southern Iran, days after the Oct. 26 attack, from injuries sustained during his arrest.
Citing Iran’s Intelligence Ministry, Monday’s report said the gunman’s accomplice was an Afghan citizen, Mohammad Ramez Rashidi. A third suspect, from neighboring Azerbaijan, was allegedly the “main coordinator” of the attack from Iran’s capital, Tehran, the report said.
IRNA said authorities have arrested 26 suspects — purportedly with links to extremist groups — over the shrine attack, all reportedly nationals of Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan.
It said, without elaborating, that some of the suspects were planning similar attack in the city of Zahedan in restive southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchestan, the scene of deadly unrest last week.
Iran is embroiled in weeks of anti-government protests that erupted after a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, detained after allegedly violating the country’s strict dress code for women, died in custody in September.
Iran says gunman behind shrine attack was from Tajikistan
https://arab.news/4q3ke
Iran says gunman behind shrine attack was from Tajikistan
- Daesh group has claimed responsibility for the Oct. 26 attack
Algeria parliament to vote on law declaring French colonization ‘state crime’
- The vote comes as the two countries are embroiled in a major diplomatic crisis
ALGERIA: Algeria’s parliament is set to vote on Wednesday on a law declaring France’s colonization of the country a “state crime,” and demanding an apology and reparations.
The vote comes as the two countries are embroiled in a major diplomatic crisis, and analysts say that while Algeria’s move is largely symbolic, it could still be politically significant.
The bill states that France holds “legal responsibility for its colonial past in Algeria and the tragedies it caused,” according to a draft seen by AFP.
The proposed law “is a sovereign act,” parliament speaker Brahim Boughali was quoted by the APS state news agency as saying.
It represents “a clear message, both internally and externally, that Algeria’s national memory is neither erasable nor negotiable,” he added.
France’s colonization of Algeria from 1830 until 1962 remains a sore spot in relations between the two countries.
French rule over Algeria was marked by mass killings and large-scale deportations, all the way to the bloody war of independence from 1954-1962.
Algeria says the war killed 1.5 million people, while French historians put the death toll lower at 500,000 in total, 400,000 of them Algerian.
French President Emmanuel Macron has previously acknowledged the colonization of Algeria as a “crime against humanity,” but has stopped short of offering an apology.
Asked last week about the vote, French foreign ministry spokesman Pascal Confavreux said he would not comment on “political debates taking place in foreign countries.”
Hosni Kitouni, a researcher in colonial history at the University of Exeter in the UK, said that “legally, this law has no international scope and therefore is not binding for France.”
But “its political and symbolic significance is important: it marks a rupture in the relationship with France in terms of memory,” he said.
