Two senior Iranian policemen have been killed and seven others seriously injured during clashes with armed "criminals" from an obscure Shiite Muslim cult, reports said Thursday.
The official news agency IRNA said the clashes in the region of Mian-Doab, not far from the city of Mahabad in the northwest, occurred Wednesday when police moved in to pull down "heretical" banners in the village of Oush-Tapeh.
According to the Iranian Internet news site Baztab, which is close to a conservative figure in the Islamic regime, the men who attacked the police were part of a religious cult called the Ali-Allahi (roughly meaning "Ali is God").
The group is made up of worshippers of Imam Ali, the figure Shiite Muslims consider the successor of the Prophet Mohammad. The cult sees Imam Ali as an incarnation of God.
According to the Baztab report, the sect has been claiming that the12 th Shiite Imam Mahdi -- known to Shiites as the "hidden Imam" after he disappeared in the year 873 AD -- had come back to earth to save the world.
The dead were identified by IRNA as a local police chief, General Bijan Ziba-Seresht, and police logistics commander, Major Reza Abbassi. It said seven other policemn were also seriously hurt, two of them critically.
Five of the attackers who opened fire on the police were arrested, said
It quoted West Azerbaijan province's police chief Ahmad Gheravand as saying that in the past month 10 policemen have been killed in the area, without saying if those deaths were connected with the latest violence.
In recent months, followers of the Ali-Allahi group have held small protests in Tehran and in the central clerical capital of Qom.