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Fears grow in Iran over rise of Sunni insurgency
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04 August 2005
Fears grow in Iran over rise of Sunni insurgency
On 13 July, the Dubai-based Al-Arabiyah television station broadcast segments of a videotape that purportedly showed the execution of Shahab Mansuri, an Iranian security official. The hitherto unknown group, calling itself God's Soldiers of the Sunni Mujahedin, captured the official sometime in mid-June, releasing a video of the hostage on 20 June. In this video, the group demanded the release of its jailed members by the Iranian authorities within three weeks or receive the "hostage's head as a gift to the elected president [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad]", Al-Arabiya reported.
The media in Iran, almost certainly under pressure from the authorities, did not report the incident nor has Tehran in any way acknowledged Mansuri. The official Iranian silence is somewhat out of step with current efforts to emphasise the threat that Al-Qaeda poses to the Shia clerical establishment in Tehran. In July, Ali Yunesi, the Intelligence Minister, announced that his ministry had intercepted an Al-Qaeda cell that planned to launch attacks in Tehran while also uncovering plans to assassinate Sunni students at a theological school in Iran "who were co-operating with Iranian authorities". Yunesi also stated that some 3,000 Al-Qaeda members had been detained, jailed or tried in Iran or deported.
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