Three confess in trial over Iran mosque blast

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Three men confessed at the start of their trial to involvement in the fatal bombing of a mosque in the southern city of Shiraz in April, state media reported on Saturday.

Iran has said the United States, Britain and Israel were involved in the blast that killed 14. Iran had initially said the explosion was an accident caused by explosives left over from an exhibition about the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.

Ali Akbar Haidarifar, representing Tehran's prosecutor general, called for the death sentence for those behind the blast which also wounded 200, the official IRNA news agency reported. Haidarifar said the group had planned other attacks.

The three confessed in the hearing at a revolutionary court, IRNA said. Such courts handle national security cases.

A further four individuals have been charged over the offence.

A little-known Iranian Sunni Muslim dissident group made a claim that it was behind the blast on a website in June. Iran is overwhelmingly Shi'ite.

"This case has got seven accused, of which the trial of the three main accused began in Tehran," IRNA reported.

Haidarifar was quoted as saying: "The explosion in Shiraz was one of the country's most fatal terrorist acts, and I ask the court to issue the death sentence on the site of the Hosseiniyeh (place of worship) for the accused."

Iran has sometimes in the past carried out executions publicly at sites where capital crimes have been committed.

Haidarifar said the inquiry into other suspects continued and said the investigation covered "those others outside the country as well as the role of countries supportive of this terrorist act, such as the United States and Britain."

He said Tehran's prosecutor general and the revolutionary court's deputy for security affairs were handling the probe.

When asked for their defense in court, IRNA said the three "confessed to being brainwashed to undertake such steps and the ideas of the terrorist groups were so effective they thought they were doing society a service with such terrorist acts."

State television broadcast footage of the three men sitting with their backs to the camera facing a judge.

Haidarifar said the group planned other attacks, such as targeting an international book fair, a seminary and shrine in the religious city of Qom, parliament in Tehran, the Russian consulate, a seminary and prayer site in the northern city of Rasht, and an oil pipeline, IRNA reported.

Iran has in the past accused Britain and the United States of trying to destabilize the Islamic Republic. Washington and London are embroiled in a row with Tehran over nuclear work they say is aimed at building atomic warheads, a charge Iran denies.

(Reporting by Hashem Kalantari, writing by Edmund Blair; Editing by Matthew Jones)