Speaker Asks Government, Interior Ministry to See into Saravan Event

“The bandits brutally martyred a number of our country’s border guards in Saravan region Friday evening,” he said in his address to the open session of parliament, asking the government to carefully study causes of the incident and to adopt the required measures.

Larijani also asked the Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Relations Commission to study the matter independently and directly in a committee and to report its results to the parliament.

He had earlier on Saturday night expressed deep sorrow over the deaths of 14 guards in a terrorist attack on the border post in the southeast of the country, and offered his sympathies to everyone affected.

This comes after 14 Iranian border guards lost their lives in an ambush attack by a terrorist group on a border post near the city of Saravan in southwestren Iran, near the border with Pakistan, on Friday night. Six more soldiers were wounded in the raid, while the assailants ambushed three other border guards.

In his Saturday message, Larijani asked the security and law enforcement forces to immediately "identify perpetrators of the heinous crime," and also called on neighboring Pakistan to counter armed terrorists according to a security agreement it has signed with Iran in the past.

Pakistan, perennially obsessed by a much larger and powerful arch rival to its east, has kept heavy army presence along its border with India.

It is also fighting a low-level, long-running separatist Baloch insurgency in its vast, sparsely populated province of Balochistan that abuts Iran. These factors have left its side of the 700-kilometer border with Iran largely at the mercy of bandits and drug traffickers.