Unidentified gunmen have killed nine foreign nationals in southeastern Iran near the Pakistani border, the semiofficial Iranian Mehr news agency reported on Saturday.
The report said no individuals or groups claimed responsibility for the shootings in the restless region. The attack follows tit-for-tat military action in the border region of Balochistan that had stoked regional tensions inflamed by the Israel-Hamas war.
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Sistan-Balochistan is one of the Sunni Muslim provinces in Shiite-dominated Iran. It has seen persistent unrest involving cross-border drug-smuggling gangs and rebels from the Balochi ethnic minority, as well as jihadists.
On January 18, Pakistan launched air strikes on “militant targets” in Iran, two days after Iran had launched strikes on its territory. Tehran said it had targeted Jaish al-Adl, a jihadist group which has carried out a spate of deadly attacks in Iran in recent months. Formed in 2012, the group is blacklisted by Iran as a “terrorist” organisation.
The Iranian strikes, which Pakistan said killed at least two children, drew a sharp rebuke from Islamabad, which recalled its ambassador from Tehran and blocked Iran’s envoy from returning to Islamabad. Tehran also summoned Islamabad’s charge d’affaires over Pakistan’s strikes, which left at least nine people dead.
The two countries, however, announced last Monday that they had decided to de-escalate and resumed diplomatic missions with the two ambassadors returning to their posts.
(With agency inputs)
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