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TEHRAN : Gunmen attacked President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's election campaign centre in the southeastern Iranian city of Zahedan on Friday, wounding three people including a child, the official IRNA news agency said.
It said the gunmen, on motorcycles, opened fire at the centre at around 7:00 pm (1430 GMT) a day after a suicide bomber killed 25 people and wounded 125 others in an attack on a Shiite mosque in Zahedan.
Iran's state-broadcaster said the pan-Arab television channel Al-Arabiya reported that the Jundullah (Soldiers of God) Sunni rebel group said it was behind Thursday's mosque attack.
Zahedan is the restive capital of Sistan-Baluchestan province bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan.
"Three knife-wielding people on motorbikes stopped outside the centre on Saadi Street, cursed, made threats and tore up billboards," Mohammad Reza Zahed Sheikhi, who heads Ahmadinejad's election office in Zahedan, told IRNA.
He said that as campaign workers for the June 12 presidential election went to protest, "the attackers pulled out guns and shot at them."
He said two campaign workers, Nasser and Khodadad Miri, received arm, stomach and shoulder wounds and were taken to hospital. The child was also shot in the stomach and was undergoing surgery, he told IRNA.
"The men ran away, but the police chased and arrested them," Sheikhi said.
A senior government official who declined to be named told AFP that incidents targeting any election candidates will be investigated.
The attack on the mosque and Friday's shooting were reminiscent of a similar outbreak of violence just days before Iran's last presidential election in 2005 which Ahmadinejad won.
Bombs hit Tehran and the city of Ahvaz in southwestern Iran in June four years ago, killing at least eight people and wounding scores more.
The deputy governor of Sistan-Baluchestan, Jalal Sayah, told the semi-official Fars news agency that the bombers of the Shiite Amir al-Momenin mosque were "hired by America and the agents of the arrogance."
Officials in the Islamic republic usually use the term "global arrogance" to refer to arch-foe Washington.
Interior Minister Sadegh Mahsooli also pointed the finger at the United States and Israel.
"Enemies try to influence the election by terror, just as they did in Zahedan yesterday," Mehr news agency quoted him as saying.
"The terror agents are neither Sunni nor Shiite but American and Israeli seeking a Sunni-Shiite divide."
Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a statement read out by state television, urged restraint.
"Those who committed this enormous sin may have done it out of anger and ignorance, but undoubtedly the hands of political planners in some interfering powers and their spy services are covered in the innocent victims' blood."
Khamenei said Sunni clerics in the province "should once again express their firm stand in loathing the corrupt ones who commit such crimes in the name of defending Sunni adherents. Shiite clerics should prevent thoughtless and angry reactions."
Zahedan MP Payman Foroozesh told ILNA news agency the mosque attacker was a suicide bomber.
Provincial justice chief Ebrahim Hamidi told ISNA news agency that one person had been arrested over the bombing and "charged with armed opposition and acting against national security."
He said most attacks in Sistan-Baluchestan province were carried out by Jundullah.
Iran's former premier and presidential hopeful Mir Hossein Mousavi also blamed "foreign forces" for the mosque blast.
"The fewer foreign forces in the region, the more security there is. They provoke extremism in the region such as the incident in Zahedan," said Mousavi, one of four candidates in next month's presidential election.
Iran has in the past blamed US and British agents based in neighbouring Iraq and Afghanistan for attacks in border provinces with significant ethnic minorities.
Sistan-Baluchestan province has a large ethnic Sunni Baluch minority.
In recent years, the province has seen a deadly insurgency by Jundullah, which is strongly opposed to the government of predominantly Shiite Iran.
The province also lies on a major narcotics-smuggling route from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
- AFP /ls
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