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Iran-Kurdistan: Senior commander killed in
Mahabad clashes
18.7.2005
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Iran-Kurdistan,
Tehran, Iran, Jul. 17 – A senior paramilitary police
commander was killed last night in the course of
clashes between anti-government demonstrators and
security forces in Iran’s Kurdish town of Mahabad,
the state-run television reported on Sunday.
“In the wake of the unrest of the past few days,
last night one of the commanders of the State
Security Forces was stabbed to death in the town by
an assailant”, Iran’s Channel 2 TV station reported
this evening.
The report added that the provincial security
council met today to study ways of bringing the
situation under control.
“Government offices, homes and cars have been
damaged in the course of the incidents that have
occurred in Mahabad in the past few days”, the
television said.
Last Sunday, agents of the State Security Forces
opened fire on Shovan Qaderi and two of his friends
in the town of Mahabad. The security forces then
tied Qaderi’s body to a Toyota jeep and dragged him
in the streets, according to eye-witnesses.
Since then, several hundred people in Mahabad have
been arrested during numerous hit-and-run clashes
and house-to-house raids.
www.iranfocus.com
Iran soldier killed in new riots in Kurdish city
TEHRAN, July 18 (AFP) - 16h02 - An Iranian
soldier has been killed in fresh disturbances in the
northwestern city of Mahabad, an historic centre of
Kurdish nationalism, the student news agency ISNA
reported Monday.
The clashes, which followed rioting in the city by
Kurds last month, broke out after police shot dead a
wanted suspect, the town's prefect Seyed Marouf
Samadi told the news agency.
Samadi said that angry residents had taken to the
streets after the suspect's family posted
photographs of his body on the Internet but denied
suggestions he had been tortured in custody.
"According to the police report, a person named
Seyed Kamal Astom, nicknamed Shovaneh, who was on
the run and wanted by the judiciary, was killed by
police bullets when he resisted arrest a few days
ago," Samadi said.
"After the post-mortem, his body was given to his
family. Photographs of his body were taken and
circulated on the Internet, angering residents who
protested violently through the city.
"During the unrest, a corporal was stabbed to death
and several window panes of official buildings
broken," he said, adding that calm had returned by
Sunday night.
Last month, following the inauguration of former
rebel leader Massoud Barzani as the first president
of neighbouring Iraqi Kurdistan, hundreds of
jubilant Kurdish demonstrators clashed with police
on the streets.
Barzani's late father Mullah Mustafa Barzani
proclaimed a short-lived Kurdish republic in Mahabad
in 1946, which remains to this day the Kurds' only
shot at independence.
Still a Kurdish-majority town, Mahabad is situated
just south of Lake Urumiyeh, near Iran's border with
Turkey and around 55 kilometres (35 miles) from the
frontier with the autonomous Kurdish region of
northern Iraq.
AFP
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