Exploding Mosque

The Daily Star reported Iranian officials on Sunday ruled out an attack as the cause of an explosion that killed 11 people inside a mosque in the southern city of Shiraz.

They don't want to admit anyone could have breached the total control they have on the country.

The explosion ripped through the mosque packed with hundreds of worshipers late Saturday as a cleric delivered his weekly speech against extremist Wahabi beliefs and the outlawed Baha'i faith, the semiofficial Fars news agency said.

It is not the extremism he preached about, but the fact that Wahabis are Sunnis.

Authorities said besides the 11 killed, 191 people were wounded, some of them critically, the state IRNA news agency reported. On Sunday, the deputy interior minister in charge of security, Abbas Mohtaj, said the explosion was "the result of an accident." He didn't elaborate.

You mean they don't intentionally blow up mosques?

The police chief of the southern Fars Province, Gen. Ali Moayyedi, said he "rejects" the possibility of an intentional bombing and "any sort of insurgency" in the blast. Moayyedi, in comments carried by state IRNA news agency, said the initial investigation found remnants of ammunition from a military exhibition that was held recently at the mosque.

I thought Islam was supposed to be a Religion of Peace. I have not seen military exhibitions at churches or synagogues.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said Sunday that no group has claimed responsibility for the explosion.

It was a small group, and they can't find any piece that can talk.

Earlier, the Fars agency quoted a local police official as saying a homemade bomb had caused the explosion and indicated the attack could been religiously motivated. But the agency backed off those speculations on Sunday.

Of course not. It was a military exhibition in the Religion of Peace.

A witness to the blast, Mostafa Nazari, told The Associated Press that some 1,000 worshipers had gathered at the mosque grounds to hear a cleric speak. He said it was fortunate the blast happened at a part of the building far from the podium,

Make a note: Hold the bomb making classes in a remote part of the mosque, perhaps near the store room where they keep the military exhibits.

around which most of the audience had crowded.

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