Trial starts in Iran for suspects in 2017 Tehran attack

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — An Iranian media outlet is reporting that the trial of alleged members of the Islamic State group who took part in an attack in Tehran in 2017 has begun in the country's Revolutionary Court.

The report from the judiciary news website Mizanonline.com says the case involves 26 defendants and eight attended the first hearing Saturday with their lawyers. Charges include being members of a terrorist organization, weapons possession and unauthorized entry into the country.

According to his indictment, a suspect identified only as S.M. left the country in 2015 and joined the Islamic State group. In 2016, he re-entered to the country wearing a suicide belt and carrying weapons.

In June 2017, five militants linked to IS stormed Iran's parliament and a shrine to revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, killing at least 18 people and wounding more than 50. </s> DUBAI (Reuters) - A Revolutionary Court in Iran on Saturday began the trial of a group accused of involvement in attacks last year which killed 18 people in the first deadly operation by Islamic State in the country.

Eight of the 26 suspects in the case attended the hearing, facing charges including belonging to a terrorist organization, weapons smuggling and unauthorized entry to Iran, the Iranian judiciary’s news website Mizanonline reported.

Sunni Islamic State, in decline in Iraq and Syria, claimed responsibility for the unprecedented attacks in majority Shi’ite Iran, in which suicide bombers and gunmen attacked the parliament and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s mausoleum in Tehran. The attackers were Kurdish Iranian Sunnis.

Iran has said that the five gunmen and suicide bombers who were killed had fought in the militants’ strongholds in Syria and Iraq. </s> Trial opened in a Tehran court on April 28 for the Islamic State (IS, ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) terrorists involved in the June 2017 attack on the Iranian parliament, Fars news agency reported.

Two separate attacks rocked the capital city of Tehran on June 7, leaving at least 17 dead and 43 injured.

The attacks were simultaneously carried out by five IS-linked terrorists against the Iranian Parliament building and the Mausoleum of late Imam Khomeini.

Eight IS members are now being tried at Tehran Revolutionary Court in the presence of their lawyers and families of those killed in the attack.

Based on the indictment, one of the suspects has joined the IS in a foreign state almost three years ago and returned to Iran last year with weapons and ammunition and while he was armed with a suicide belt. He was tasked with coordination for terrorist attacks inside the country.

All the suspects present in the first court session were arrested on June 7-26, 2017, and they are accused of purchasing, carrying and keeping light, semi-heavy and heavy arms and conducting terrorist attack.

Follow Trend on Telegram. Only most interesting and important news </s> File: An group is accused of involvement in attacks last year which killed 18 people in the first deadly operation by Islamic State in the country. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

DUBAI - A Revolutionary Court in Iran on Saturday began the trial of a group accused of involvement in attacks last year which killed 18 people in the first deadly operation by Islamic State in the country.

Eight of the 26 suspects in the case attended the hearing, facing charges including belonging to a terrorist organisation, weapons smuggling and unauthorised entry to Iran, the Iranian judiciary's news website Mizanonline reported.

Sunni Islamic State, in decline in Iraq and Syria, claimed responsibility for the unprecedented attacks in majority Shi'ite Iran, in which suicide bombers and gunmen attacked the parliament and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s mausoleum in Tehran. The attackers were Kurdish Iranian Sunnis.

Iran has said that the five gunmen and suicide bombers who were killed had fought in the militants’ strongholds in Syria and Iraq. </s> TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran executed eight men convicted over the 2017 Islamic State attack on parliament and the shrine of the Islamic Republic’s founding ayatollah, the bloodiest terror attack to strike Tehran in decades, authorities said Saturday.

The June 7, 2017 attack has so far been the only assault by the Sunni extremists inside of Shiite Iran, which has been deeply involved in the wars in Iraq and Syria where the militants once held vast territory. IS has since have been beaten back by Iranian-aided Shiite militias in Iraq, as well as by a U.S.-led coalition operating in both countries, though Iran has made other arrests involving the group in the time since.

The judiciary’s official Mizan news agency announced the executions Saturday morning, but did not say when or where they took place. The head of Tehran’s Justice Department, Gholamhossein Esmaili, told Iranian state television that authorities conducted the executions days earlier but chose not to immediately announce them, likely as a security measure.

Executions in Iran are carried out by hangings.

Mizan noted in its report that the executions came after the eight men had been tried and convicted in a trial that included both eyewitness testimony and video footage showing their involvement by providing the attackers support in the days leading up to the assault.

“These eight worked directly … in martyring and wounding a number of innocent compatriots,” Mizan said.

The news agencies on Saturday named those executed as Soleiman Mozafari, Esmail Sufi, Rahman Behrouz, Majed Mortezai, Sirous Azizi, Ayoub Esmaili, Khosro Ramezani and Osman Behrouz. Over a dozen others remain on trial over the attack.

While Iran is one of the world’s top enforcers of the death penalty, such mass executions are rare. In August 2016, human rights activists criticized Iran for carrying out the mass execution of 20 convicted Sunni militants from a group identified as Jihad and Tawhid after a six-year trial. In August 2007, Iran hanged seven men convicted of rape in Mashhad at the same time.

The June 2017 Islamic State attack killed at least 18 people and wounded more than 50. It saw gunmen carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles and explosives storm the parliament complex where a legislative session had been in progress, starting an hours-long siege.

Meanwhile, gunmen and suicide bombers also struck outside Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s mausoleum on Tehran’s southern outskirts. Khomeini led the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled the Western-backed shah to become Iran’s first supreme leader until his death in 1989.

The assault shocked Tehran, which largely has avoided militant attacks in the decades after the years-long tumult surrounding the Islamic Revolution. The image of a child being passed out of a window at parliament under the watch of armed security forces remains seared in the minds of many.

Iran’s security forces responded with heavy force. Authorities arrested suspected IS militants, including their wives. In August 2017, Iran’s Intelligence Ministry said it detained 27 militants linked to the Islamic State group who planned to attack holy Shiite cities within the country.

Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard responded to the attack by launching six ballistic missiles into eastern Syria targeting IS militants. It marked the first time Iran had fired its missiles in anger since its 1980s war with Iraq.

That raised new concerns in the West about its ballistic missile program amid the unraveling of its nuclear deal with world powers. That deal is now in danger of collapse with America’s withdrawal from the accord. Economic problems, water scarcity and other woes meanwhile have led to protests in Iran.

Iran remains one of the world’s top executioners. It was second only to China in 2017 in the number of known executions carried out, conducting over 500 hangings, according to Amnesty International.

The IS executions come as controversy still swirls in Iran around the country’s mass executions of 1988 near the end of the Iran-Iraq War. Activists at the time said Iran executed as many as 5,000 people after sham trials of Communists, Kurdish separatists, political prisoners and members of an Iranian exile group known as the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq.

Those executions represent one of the darkest moments of Iran’s post-revolution history and are still not recognized by its government.

Copyright © 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed. </s> TEHRAN: Twenty-six alleged members of the Islamic State group went on trial in Iran on Saturday (Apr 28) over attacks last year on parliament and the tomb of revolutionary leader Ruhollah Khomeini, local media reported.

Seventeen people were killed and dozens injured in the simultaneous attacks in Tehran on Jun 7-- the first claimed by IS inside Iran.

The judiciary-linked Mizan news agency said several of the accused were Iranians who had left to join IS in neighbouring countries and returned for the attacks.

Five attackers were killed on the day, but police said at the time that five people had been arrested at the scenes of the attacks in central and south Tehran.

Dozens more arrests were reported in the following months - many in operations along the borders with Iraq and Turkey.

There were few details from the first day of the trial, which was held in the presence of the victims' families.

Most of Iran's population is Shiite, and therefore considered heretics by the Sunni jihadists of IS, who have increasingly called for attacks on the country.

Iran has also supported the governments of Iraq and Syria against IS and other jihadist insurgents. </s> JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — An Indonesian court sentenced an Islamic militant to nine years in prison on Monday for masterminding a double suicide bombing last year that targeted police at a bus terminal in Jakarta.

Kiki Muhammad Iqbal, 38, was among six suspected militants who were arrested days after the attack, in which two bombers blew themselves up, killing three policemen and themselves. The attack also wounded 12 people, both police and civilians.

The suspects were believed to be members of Jemaah Anshorut Daulah, a network of about two dozen Indonesian extremist groups that formed in 2015 and pledges allegiance to Islamic State group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

The network, which the United States has designated a terrorist grouping, has been implicated in a number of attacks in Indonesia over the past year.

A panel of three judges at North Jakarta District Court ruled that Iqbal had organized and incited others to launch the suicide attacks through his jihadist sermons at a mosque in Bandung, the capital of West Java province. The bombers and other suspects attended the mosque.

"The defendant has legally and convincingly been proven guilty of organizing and inciting others to commit acts of terrorism," said presiding Judge Purwanto, who uses one name.

The May 24 attack last year was the deadliest in Jakarta since January 2016, when a suicide and gun strike in the central business district killed four civilians and four assailants.

In a separate trial in the same court, a panel of three judges sentenced another militant, Muslih Afifi Afandi, to seven years in jail for harboring other suspects and hiding information about the attacks from authorities.

Officials in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation, have carried out a sustained crackdown on militants since the 2002 bombings by al-Qaida-affiliated radicals that killed 202 people in Bali. In recent years the country has faced a new threat as the rise of the Islamic State group in the Middle East has breathed new life into local militant networks. </s> The South Jakarta District Court found on Friday Aman Abdurrahman guilty of inciting several terror attacks in Indonesia and sentenced the radical cleric to death.

"The defendant has been found guilty beyond reasonable doubt of inciting others to commit terrorism," presiding judge Akhmad Jaini read in the verdict.

Aman, the de facto leader of Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), a local affiliate of the Islamic State (IS) terror group, had been found responsible for inciting others to commit at least five terror attacks in Indonesia, including the Thamrin shootings and suicide bombings in 2016 on Jl. MH Thamrin in Central Jakarta and the Kampung Melayu bombings in East Jakarta last year.

The panel of five judges found his teachings were behind the terror attacks.

Aman denied that he was involved in the attack, despite admitting that he had urged his followers to go to Syria to join the IS in its quest to establish a global caliphate.

He denounced in his defense plea the recent terror attacks in Indonesia, saying the perpetrators were ignorant and mentally ill.

The judges dismissed Aman's claim, saying based on witnesses’ testimony he had instructed his followers to create chaos and panic in Indonesia as mandated by IS leader Al-Baghdadi. </s> The Islamic State (Isil) has claimed responsibility for a coordinated attack by gunmen and suicide bombers on Iran’s parliament and the the shrine of Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of the Iranian Revolution.

Teams of attackers struck the two sites in Tehran early on Wednesday morning, killing at least 12 people and wounding dozens of others, according to Iranian state media. If confirmed that Isil was behind the attack, it would be their most ambitious operation yet against Iran.

One suicide bomber blew themselves up at the Khomeini shrine, which is highly symbolic for Iran’s theocratic leadership. A second bomber later detonated their explosives at the parliament during a stand off with security forces.

Isil’s Amaq news agency released a short statement soon after the attacks saying: “Fighters from the Islamic State attacked the shrine of Khomeini and the Iranian parliament building in the centre of Tehran.”

The jihadist group claimed credit with unusual speed and released a video of the attackers inside the parliament building.
An Iranian Revolutionary Court begins a trial of eight alleged Islamic State members accused of involvement in gun and suicide bomb attacks that killed eighteen in Tehran.