Some 35 people were wounded, 15 critically, in the blast in the city of Mahabad, in a predominantly Kurdish area near the borders of Iraq and Turkey, the ISNA news agency reported.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but local officials blamed militants, possibly helped by foreign countries wishing to harm the Islamic Republic during “Sacred Defence” celebrations, an annual ceremony for the Iranian military.
“This bomb was a time-bomb planted on a tree among the people and it went off at 10:20 (0650 GMT),” the website of state-run television IRIB quoted a military official as saying.
“Counter-revolutionary groups, by inserting themselves among the people attending the armed forces parade, showed their heinous face,” said Vahid Jalalzadeh, the provincial governor of Iran’s West Azerbaijan province.
Television footage showed troops marching past a ceremonial podium when a blast happened. Pictures of the aftermath showed blood on the ground, shoes and an abandoned pram.
The attack occurred as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York amid a standoff between Tehran and major powers over Iran’s nuclear programme, which the West suspects is aimed at making weapons.
On August 4, a homemade explosive went off near Ahmadinejad’s motorcade as he was travelling to the western city of Hamadan. He was unharmed and officials said the blast was just a firecracker.
Several armed groups hostile to the government are active in Iran, including Kurdish separatists in the northwest, Baluch militants in the southeast and some Arabs in the southwest.
The Sunni Muslim Jundollah Baluch militant group, which Iran says has linked to al Qaeda, is the most active. It claimed a double suicide attack that killed 28 people, including Revolutionary Guards, on July 15 in revenge for the execution of its leader.
In Mahabad, Jalalzadeh said today’s explosion happened some 50 metres from the podium and that two military officials’ wives were among the dead.
No casualties were reported among the military personnel and political dignitaries attending the annual parade – one of several held across the country to commemorate Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s.
Around one million people were killed in the war, a traumatic period in Iranian history but one which helped unify Iranians around the leadership of the new Islamic Republic.
Iranian media have often reported clashes between government forces and Kurdish guerrillas said to be members of Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) which took up arms in 1984 for an ethnic homeland in southeast Turkey and northwest Iran.
Mahabad was the capital of a short-lived Soviet-backed “Republic of Kurdistan” in 1946, which was crushed within a few months. It was also the centre of a Kurdish uprising shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Jalalzadeh speculated that the United States – Iran’s greatest foe – may have had a hand in the bombing.
“As far as the investigations show (the incident) has a foreign source, he told Iranian TV.
“Their support for counter revolutionary hypocrites and terrorist groups in the region has been clearly proved and today’s action was one of the incidents which was (staged) by the conspiracy of foreign governments.”
At the main national parade, held in Tehran before the bombing, the armed forces chief of staff blamed Washington for supporting the government’s opponents inside Iran.
“(US Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton has expressed concern and disappointment with (the US) inability to take military action against Iran and decided (instead) to create sedition inside Iran,” Hassan Firouzabadi said.
Clinton recently voiced support for Iranians who oppose a regime that she said was “morphing into a military dictatorship”.
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