"At Iran's request, the UN Security Council condemned the deadliest terrorist attack in the country in years and extended 'sincere condolences' to the Iranian people, but not to their government, at US insistence", Associated Press reported on February 15.
In a statement read to journalists at the UN's New York headquarters that day, Security Council president Peter Burian said that the 15 member-countries of the council "condemned the terrorist attack on a bus in the south-eastern city of Zahedan in Iran, carried out on 14 February 2007, which killed at least 18 people and wounded many more".
Zahedan is located near Iran's border with Afghanistan and Pakistan and is the capital of Iran's Sistan and Baluchistan province, home to Iran's million-strong Baluchi-speaking Sunni Muslim minority.
Responsibility for the attack was claimed by Jundallah (Party of God), a Pakistan-based Baluchi separatist group. It said the attack was in retaliation for the execution of people convicted for a series of terrorist bombings — including the bombing of a shopping mall — that took place in 2005 in the south-western city of Ahwaz, capital of Khuzestan province, home to Iran's 2 million ethnic Arabs.
Two Iranian Arab separatist groups, the London-based Arab People's Democratic Popular Front and the Canada-based Ahwaz Arab Renaissance Party, claimed responsibility for the bombings. However, the main foreign-based Ahwaxi separatist group, the Democratic Solidarity Party of Al-Ahwaz, condemned the bombings, arguing that many of those killed were Khuzestani Arabs.
In his February 15 press statement, Burian said: "The members of the Security Council reiterated that no cause can justify the use of terrorist violence. They underlined the need to bring to justice the perpetrators, organisers and sponsors of this terrorist attack, as with all terrorist attacks."
While Washington's acting UN ambassador Alejandro Wolff approved the issuing of this statement, his government is covertly funding and supplying weapons to the groups carrying out these terrorist attacks.
The February 26 London Sunday Telegraph reported: "America is secretly funding militant ethnic separatist groups in Iran … The operations are controversial because they involve dealing with movements that resort to terrorist methods in pursuit of their grievances against the Iranian regime …
"Funding for their separatist causes comes directly from the CIA's classified budget but is now 'no great secret', according to one former high-ranking CIA official in Washington who spoke anonymously to the Sunday Telegraph.
"His claims were backed by Fred Burton, a former US state department counter-terrorism agent, who said: 'The latest attacks inside Iran fall in line with US efforts to supply and train Iran's ethnic minorities to destabilise the Iranian regime.'
"Although Washington officially denies involvement in such activity, Teheran has long claimed to detect the hand of both America and Britain in attacks by guerrilla groups on its internal security forces."
In an article in the Washington Quarterly magazine's first issue for 2007, John Bradley, the former managing editor of the Saudi Arabia-based Arab News, wrote that Baluchistan province is "particularly crucial for Iran's national security as it borders Sunni Pakistan and US-occupied Afghanistan … In fact, the Sunni Balochi resistance could prove valuable to Western intelligence agencies with an interest in destabilizing the hardline regime in Tehran …
"The United States maintained close contacts with the Balochis till 2001, at which point it withdrew support when Tehran promised to repatriate any US airmen who had to land in Iran as a result of damage sustained in combat operations in Afghanistan. These contacts could be revived to sow turmoil in Iran's southeastern province and work against the ruling regime."
Bradley revealed that US policymakers have taken a great interest lately in Iran's internal ethnic politics, "focusing on their possible impact on the Iranian regime's long-term stability as well as impact on its short-term domestic and foreign policy choices". He specifically cited a classified research project sponsored by the Pentagon that is examining the depth and nature of ethnic grievances in Iran's plural society.
"The Pentagon", Bradely wrote, "is especially interested in whether Iran is prone to a violent fragmentation along the same kinds of faultlines that are splitting Iraq and that helped to tear apart the Soviet Union with the collapse of communism."
The Sunday Telegraph also reported that a "row" has broken out "in Washington over whether to 'unleash' the military wing of the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), an Iraq-based Iranian opposition group with a long and bloody history of armed opposition to the Iranian regime".
The MEK, also known as the People's Mujahedin of Iran, was given sanctuary and support by Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq during its US-backed 1980-88 war against Iran. While the MEK has been on the State Department's list of terrorist organisations since 1997, its National Council of Resistance of Iran front group has been allowed to operate openly in the US.
John Pike, the head of the influential Washington-based Global Security think tank, told the Sunday Telegraph that "a faction in the Defence Department wants to unleash them. They could never overthrow the current Iranian regime but they might cause a lot of damage".
Associated Press reported on February 16 that, only minutes before another terrorist bombing in Zahedan, this time at a girls' school, Abdolmalek Rigi, the leader of Jundallah, appeared on an Iraq-based TV station run by the MEK.