IRAN: Bomb blasts in Tehran and the southwestern oil city of Ahvaz killed at least seven people and wounded 73 yesterday, five days before Iran's presidential election.
Four bombs in Ahvaz, capital of the partly Arabic-speaking province of Khuzestan, targeted government buildings.
"We had six martyrs and 70 wounded," Ahvaz governor Mohammad Jaafar Sarrami said.
The Popular Democratic Front of Ahvaz, which is campaigning for an independent Khuzestan, denied it was behind the attacks, but said another Arab group calling itself the Ahvazi Revolutionary Martyrs' Brigades had claimed responsibility.
Hours later, a small bomb concealed in a rubbish container exploded in central Tehran, killing at least one person.
"There is one dead and three wounded," said Interior Ministry spokesman Jahanbakhsh Khan- jani.
Police cordoned off the area where the blast occurred in a street off Imam Hossein Square in a crowded commercial district.
Raheb Homavandi, a Reuters photographer, said he had seen the body of the victim, a man. There was no immediate word on who had carried out the Tehran bombing or whether it was linked to the attacks in Ahvaz.
Gholamreza Shariati, deputy governor of Khuzestan province, where five people were killed in ethnic unrest in April, said earlier that women and children were among the bomb casualties in Ahvaz.
The bombs targeted the governor's office in Ahvaz, 550 km (342 miles) southwest of Tehran, as well as two local government departments and a housing complex for state media employees.
Khuzestan contains the vast bulk of Iran's 132 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the world's second largest.
About 150 demonstrators protested outside the governor's office in the evening, waving Iranian flags and chanting "death to the hypocrites" - a term used for the exiled opposition People's Mujahideen Organisation.
Shariati said the bombings were aimed at disrupting the election, in which opinion polls tip Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani to regain the post he held from 1989 to 1997.
Rafsanjani, a wily pragmatist seen as the most moderate of five conservative candidates, remains well short of the 50 per cent support he needs to avoid a run-off vote. A poll published on Saturday showed that Mostafa Moin, one of three reformists in the race, had edged ahead of former police chief Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf into second place.
The US-based Human Rights Watch group yesterday said the election would not be free or fair because only candidates approved by an unelected religious committee can stand.
More than 1,000 people registered as candidates, but the 12-man Guardian Council excluded all but six. Two reformists were reinstated on the list after Khamenei intervened. None of the 89 women who had tried to stand was allowed to do so.
"Iran's elections for all practical purposes are pre-cooked," Human Rights Watch said.
Outside Tehran University about 300 women staged a protest against gender discrimination in the Islamic state. One of their demands was an end to the ban on women running for president.
"Unequal laws that violate human rights must be annulled," the women chanted, watched by dozens of police. At least one demonstrator was arrested, witnesses said.