Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Iran arrests Jundallah's Abdolmalek Rigi ... on a flight from Dubai...

WaPo/ here
Iran arrested the leader of Sunni Muslim rebel group Jundollah, Abdolmalek Rigi, on Tuesday, Iranian media reported.
Iran has linked Jundollah (God's soldiers) to the Sunni Islamist al Qaeda network and accuses Pakistan, Britain and the United States of backing the group to destabilize the country...... Iran's interior minister said Rigi was arrested outside Iran..... on board a flight from Dubai to Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia.
"Rigi was arrested outside Iran and transferred over to Iran," the semi-official Fars news agency quoted Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar as saying......
The group said it was behind an October 18 attack, the deadliest in Iran since the 1980s, that killed more than 40 Iranians, including 15 from the elite Revolutionary Guards.
Iran says Jundollah has bases in Pakistan, suggesting it has links with Pakistani intelligence.
Iranian officials said Rigi was briefly detained on September 26 in Pakistan's Baluchistan province, but said Pakistan released him before the October attack and demanded Islamabad hand him over.
"Rigi has been under our intelligence agents' surveillance for a while ... He and the group with him were arrested at an opportune time," Najjar said, adding that more details about Rigi's arrest would be disclosed soon..."

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