Pat Dollard

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Iranian Media Report From Press Tv. IRNA, the official state press agency, is so far ignoring the story.

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – A bomb explosion in a mosque in southern Iran Saturday killed several people, state television reported.

Television report said several people had been killed and an unspecified number were wounded in the bombing in the city of Shiraz, about 559 miles south of the capital Tehran.

The semi-official Fars news agency said eight people were killed and more than 66 injured. Fars said the death toll was expected to rise because some of the injured were in critical condition.

The official IRNA news agency said several people were injured but added that no official reports were yet available on deaths. There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancies in the reports.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the explosion. Local official Mohammad Reza Hadaegh told state TV the cause of the blast was under investigation.

Fars said the force of the explosion shook houses more than a half mile from the site of the bombing and ambulances and firefighters were rushing to the mosque.

Although bomb attacks are rare in Iran, the predominantly Shiite Muslim country has faced several ethnic and religious insurgencies that have carried out sporadic, sometimes deadly attacks in recent years. None have amounted to a serious threat to the government.

In February 2007, a car loaded with explosives blew up near a bus carrying members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, killing 11 of them and wounding more than 30 in southeastern Iran. A Sunni militant group that has been blamed for past attacks on Iranian troops claimed responsibility.

Some believe that group, known as Jundallah, is linked to al-Qaida. Jundallah, or God’s Brigade, has been waging a low-level insurgency in southeastern Iran.

Besides the violence in the southeast, ethnic Arab Sunni militants have been blamed for bombings in the western city of Ahvaz near the border of Iraq—including blasts in 2006 that killed nine people.