TEHRAN — A bomb exploded Wednesday among spectators at an annual army parade in a predominantly Kurdish city in northwestern Iran, killing 11 people and wounding at least 93, officials said.
A Kurdish separatist group that authorities suspected of involvement denied any responsibility for the blast in the city of Mahabad, near Iran’s borders with Iraq and Turkey. The explosion occurred about 10 a.m. local time during a parade commemorating the 30th anniversary of the start of the Iran-Iraq war.
Ten of those killed were women, and the other a child, Iranian officials said.
Iran’s Arabic news channel al-Alam reported that the bomb was a timed device left in a bag along the parade route. The semiofficial Mehr News Agency said the bomb exploded in an area where VIPs were gathering to watch the parade and that the wives of two ranking Iranian military officers were among the dead.
The explosion in Mahabad highlighted tensions in border areas and could trigger further unrest in Iran’s Kurdish region, where unemployment is higher than in other parts of the Islamic Republic.
In an unrelated incident, a doctor was assassinated Tuesday evening by men on a motorcycle while he was leaving his clinic in central Tehran, the Iranian Student News Agency reported Wednesday.
The motive for the murder of Abdolreza Soudbakhsh was not immediately clear. Drive- by shootings are highly uncommon in Iran.
