Cop killed in Iran suicide bombing, Al-Qaeda-linked outfit likely behind attack

A suicide bomber killed a local police officer and wounded another in a southern Iranian port city, home to a large Sunni Muslim community, local media said on Sunday.

The hard-line Javan Daily, a newspaper close to the country’s powerful Revolutionary Guard, said the attacker stopped Capt Mojtaba Shahid’s car on Saturday evening in Bandar Lengeh in the province of Hormozgan before detonating his vest.

Shahid’s deputy, who was also in the car, was hospitalised in critical condition, the paper reported, describing the attack as an act of terrorism.

The city, some 1,000 kilometres south of the capital Tehran, has no recent history of terrorism.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but some local news outlets claimed Ansar al-Furqan, an Al-Qaeda-linked Sunni terrorist group, was behind it.