ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – The mastermind of the Tehran attacks has been killed Saturday outside of Iran in an Iranian-led operation in coordination with the intelligence of “a friendly foreign country,” Iran’s intelligence minister has said.
Mahmoud Alavi said that they have been able to locate and arrest 42 or 43 of the people in the group responsible for the attacks in Tehran that killed 17 people.
He said those arrested had a safe house in the Kurdish city of Kermanshah in the northwest of Iran.
Alavi added that there was a second safe house used by the five gunmen who attacked the parliament in the center of the capital and the shrine of Ayatollah Khomeini, southern Tehran.
He did not mention the location of the second safe house.
"One of their brothers who was more dangerous than them fell into the hands of the intelligence services and has been arrested,” the intelligence minister said in a televised press conference of the five gunmen.
"The person who was commanding them and who was stationed in the border areas, and had left the country after their [attackers’] deaths was killed in coordination with intelligence services of a friendly foreign country," by the Iranian intelligence services, Alavi added.
He said the level of planned terror attacks has increased this year to an extent that they were arresting terror groups on a daily basis.
He added that the amount of explosives and weapons they confiscated in their raids after the attacks shows that they were planning something bigger than a mere “partisan operation.”
Those with knowledge of military operations know that “this amount of weapons is for a military war,” the minister added.
The ISIS group that had claimed the Tehran deadly attacks published a video of five gunmen that appear threatening Iranians of a “slaughter” campaign to be waged by the soldiers of the “Islamic State.”
The gunmen also warned Saudi Arabia that after Iran, they are next to be targeted.
Rudaw understands that four of the attackers are from the Kurdish province of Kermanshah, in particular Paweh district. The identity of the fifth man is still unclear.
An earlier statement from Iran’s ministry of intelligence had said that they arrested 41 ISIS members within the three Kurdish provinces of Kermanshah, Kurdistan, Azerbaijan Gharbi, and also in Tehran.
The ministry said that the gunmen had a record in “terrorism” with links to the Sunni extremist groups, who had then joined the ISIS group and fought alongside the ISIS militants in Mosul and Raqqa.
ISIS claimed the attacks on Wednesday, also publishing a video that it claimed was from the parliament building.
The ministry added that the group returned to Iran last year trying to commit acts of terrorism in the holy cities of the country but they failed to do so since the security forces inflicted damage on their network while killing its ringleader named Abu Aisha.
The five gunmen remained in the country until they committed the two coordinated attacks, three of them attacking the parliament, and the other two attacking the shrine.
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