Iranian security forces on Tuesday said they have killed four members of an extremist rebel group behind an attack that left 14 Iranian border guards dead, as an Iranian general warned that Tehran “reserves the right to pursue the bandits on Pakistani soil”.
“We clashed with Jaish-ul Adl and killed four of them,” the Fars news agency quoted Brigadier General Hossein Zolfaqari, commander of Iran’s border guards, as saying. He did not say when or where the new clash took place. Jaish-ul Adl, a rebel group formed last year whose name means Army of Justice in Arabic, has claimed responsibility for the deadly ambush on Friday in the mountains of Sistan-Baluchestan in the restive southeast. The attack killed 14 border guards and wounded another seven. Iran in retaliation said it had executed 16 “rebels” – eight insurgents and eight drug traffickers, all of whom had been on death row, according to Iranian media. “Whatever measure they take against us, our response will be more crushing,” Zolfaqari said. In a press briefing in the afternoon, he said that 20 “bandits” had been killed in 67 clashes near the border since March 2013, the Mehr news agency reported. The general also warned that Iran “reserves the right to pursue the bandits on Pakistani soil,” adding that his unit had informed its Pakistani counterparts of this, Mehr added.