A bomb exploded in a mosque in the southern Iranian city Shiraz on Saturday, killing at least nine people and wounding more than 100, Iranian media reported.Ambulances rushed to the scene of the blast in a crowded district of the city, state television said. "At least nine people were killed and 105 injured in the blast," the semi-official Fars news agency quoting a local hospital official as saying. The death toll was expected to rise because some of the wounded were in critical condition, the official said. State television urged people in Shiraz to donate blood for the wounded and said that all nurses in the city had been called to report for work.
The official IRNA news agency said the bomb exploded during an address by a cleric in the Shohada mosque in Shiraz. Fars said that on Saturday nights the cleric usually gave speeches on the Baha'i faith, an offshoot of Islam considered heretical by the country's Shi'ite Muslim establishment. Its members claim they face discrimination and persecution in Iran. Iran says that all Iranians, regardless of creed, enjoy the same rights.
Additional: Saeedeh Ghorbani, 20, who was wounded in the blast, said around 800 people were in the mosque when the bomb, believed to have been a homemade device, went off. "After we heard an explosion, there was smoke everywhere," she said. The blast happened as a cleric was giving an address to children affiliated with the Rahpoyan-e Vesal Association, which "holds meetings every Saturday regarding misguided groups, including Wahabis and Bahais", Fars reported.
Wahabi is a fundamentalist strain of Sunni Islam, practiced mainly in Saudi Arabia, notably by the ruling Saudi royal family. It considers Shias – who dominate Iran – to be heretics. The Bahai faith, viewed as heretical by the Iranian religious authorities, has been banned since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Bombings have been rare in Iran in recent years, although a number of people have been killed in ethnic and religious insurgencies. Sunni militants claimed responsibility in February last year for a car bomb that exploded beside a bus carrying members of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard, killing 11 and wounding more than 30. Ethnic Arab Sunni militants were also blamed for a series of bombings in the south-western oil city of Ahvaz, near the border with Iraq, in 2005 and 2006. Nine people died in the 2006 attacks.