1938 Alert from The Guardian, with thanks to JE:
Iran accused Britain of trying to stir religious and ethnic unrest in its eastern border region yesterday after armed rebels ambushed a party of government officials and killed 21.
Police said the victims, who included security officials, were ordered out of their vehicles and shot in cold blood. The fleet of cars was then set ablaze. Seven others, including the governor of the provincial capital, Zahidan, were wounded in Thursday night’s incident, which happened after gunmen, disguised in military uniforms, set up a roadblock to intercept the convoy as it travelled along a remote spot in the south-eastern province of Sistan-Baluchestan….
All the victims of Thursday’s incident, the most serious in a spate of recent violent clashes in the province, were Sistani and Shia, official Iranian media reported. There was no claim of responsibility but government officials wasted little time in linking the incident with British and US forces stationed in neighbouring Afghanistan.
“We have information that the bandits had meetings with British intelligence services,” Iran’s national police chief, Esmaeel Ahmadi Moqaddam, a relative of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told state television. “It appears that a plan to create instability and religious hatred similar to the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra [in Iraq] is being pursued here.”