Iran said Tuesday it arrested “terrorist” members of an exiled opposition group in a new crackdown on the anniversary of the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The regime blamed Britain, Sweden and France for supporting the group that allegedly trained in Iraq.
“The leaders of this criminal group wanted to detonate bombs in sensitive places in Tehran," according to Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi, quoted by Iran’s government-funded Press TV. It reported that members of the Mujahideen Khalq Organization intended to detonate bombs in a “few squares in Tehran.”
Moslehi did not say how many people were arrested.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guards had warned opposition groups to stay off the streets Saturday, the anniversary of the elections that were widely believed to have been rigged. More than 100 demonstrators were killed, two of them hanged, and hundreds of others were arrested or “disappeared” in daily protests that were brutally suppressed until they subsided in January.
Opposition leaders called off a planned rally Saturday out of fear of people losing their lives.
Two days earlier, Guards arrested 13 members of an anti-revolutionary group who also were alleged with being “terrorists,” a term that the Islamic Republic loosely defines to include some anti-regime elements.
Iranian security forces claimed they were involved in the assassination of senior officials in the Kurdistan province's high- ranking officials in September 2009.
"The (unidentified) group was directly engaged in various assassination plots and acts of violence" against Iranian officials, a government statement said. The suspects allegedly “had in their possession some 500 kilograms (1,100-pounds) of explosive material and a huge cache of weapons, all of which were confiscated by security officials," the statement added.