Iran’s president acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday that Afghan and Pakistani intelligence helped his government to hunt down the leader of the most dangerous ethnic opposition movement.

Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad paid an official visit to Kabul, the Afghan capital, and disclosed the help that Iran received to arrest Abdolmalek Rigi, the commander of the Jundollah guerrilla group which seeks independence for the Baluchi minority.

Mr Rigi was captured about two weeks ago in an operation outside Iran’s borders. During a press conference in Kabul with Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad acknowledged the role of his neighbours in this operation, and “in particular Afghanistan”.

Go to Financial Times.

After Abdolmalek Rigi—the suspected leader of the anti-Iranian jihadist group Jundullah—was arrested by Iranian authorities last week, he made a startling public claim: the Obama administration offered to give his group money and munitions to help in their efforts to undermine the government of Iran. Obama administration officials say Rigi is making up stories. They insist the United States has never had a relationship with Jundullah, a little-known group of Sunni jihadists based along Pakistan’s border with Iran. The group has carried out deadly bombing attacks that have killed hundreds of Iranian soldiers and civilians.

Yet there appears to be at least some brief history between the U.S. and Junduallah. Declassified has learned that several years ago, the group did in fact try to cut a deal with U.S. officials—but were rebuffed.

A former U.S. intelligence official said that soon after the 9/11 attacks, a top Jundullah operative, claiming to be acting on Rigi’s authority, approached CIA representatives in Pakistan and told them the group would help the U.S. against both Iran and Al Qaeda. According to the former U.S. official—who like others cited in this article asked for anonymity when talking about sensitive information—the Jundullah operative proposed that the group would kidnap leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Al Qaeda and turn them over to the Americans. U.S. officials flatly rejected any relationship with the group, said the former official. But the official did say that the door was left slightly ajar in case Jundullah really did capture important Al Qaeda operatives. That never happened.

Jundullah has become the focus of news stories following Rigi’s reported capture. Iranian state-run television broadcast what it claimed was Rigi’s confession. On camera, Rigi said, that the Obama administration promised him unlimited military aid and funding for an insurgency against Iran’s embattled clerical regime. “After Obama was elected, the Americans contacted us and they met me in Pakistan,” Rigi told his Iranian interviewers. “They said they would cooperate with us and will give me military equipment, arms and machine guns. They also promised to give us a base along the border with Afghanistan next to Iran.” (These quotes are taken from a transcript prepared by Press TV, an  English-language network run by the Iranian government.) Go to Newsweek.

Three days after he was allegedly captured by Iranians in a still cloudy operation, Baluchi rebel leader Abdulmalek Rigi was shown on Iranian television and appeared to confess to ties to the Obama administration.

Rigi, 27-year-old leader of Jundallah, the ethnic Baluchi separatist group, appeared in good health, but at times seemed to be reading his confession, which lacked any dates or names of individual Americans he was supposedly in touch with through an unnamed third person.

The confession neatly matched the narrative touted by Iran’s hard-liners, who have long alleged that the United States has been covertly funding groups seeking to undermine the Islamic Republic.

“He came and said that they have asked for a meeting,” Rigi said. “‘Come and cooperate with us and we will put financial resources at your disposal. We will supply you with military facilities and arms and ammunition and we will also give you a base in Afghanistan on the border with Iran.” Go to LA Times.

State-run television in Iran showed what it said was a televised confession on Thursday by Abdolmalek Rigi, the recently captured leader of Jundallah, a militant group that claims to be defending Sunni Muslims in Iran’s southeast and has killed hundreds of Iranian soldiers and civilians since 2003.

According to Press TV, Iran’s state-controlled, English-language broadcaster, Iranian officials said that Mr. Rigi had been detained after his flight from the United Arab Emirates to Kyrgyzstan was ordered to land as it passed through Iranian air space. But Al Jazeera, the satellite TV channel based in Qatar, reported that Mr. Rigi was arrested in Pakistan last week and handed over to Iran.

Mr. Rigi’s group says it is fighting on behalf of Sunni Muslims from the Baluchi ethnic group, which is found on both sides of the border between Iran and Pakistan. Jundallah has taken responsibility for a string of bombings in Iran, including one last October that killed 15 members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and 25 civilians.

As Scott Lucas, an expert on the Middle East who runs the blog Enduring America, noted on Friday, Press TV published an English translation of Mr. Rigi’s statement and showed this video of him delivering it in Persian, with an English voice-over: Go to NY Times.

Pakistan has watched warily as both Iran and archrival India have expanded their influence with anti-Pakistani forces in Afghanistan — a country many in Islamabad still view as their backyard. The arrest earlier this month of Mullah Abdul Baradar, rumored Taliban deputy commander, by Pakistani authorities in Karachi has been seen as a sign of Islamabad’s desire to now dismember some of the terror networks it once helped create. Handing over Rigi may be another gesture of goodwill. “Actions like this ease pressure on India and Iran,” says Abbas. “There’s now a chance for more cooperation and coordination.”

That’s welcome news for Washington as it struggles to bring stability to Afghanistan nearly a decade since its invasion. It’s less welcome for Rigi, who now sits in an undisclosed location in Iran, at the mercy of Tehran’s interrogators.

Abdol Malek Rigi under armed guard following his arrest. Photo: Reuters

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Iran’s security forces said they captured the head of an ethnic militant group they have fought for years Tuesday morning and claimed he was at an American base in Afghanistan a day before he was caught.

Abdulmalak Rigi, the infamous leader of the ethnic Baluch militant group Jundallah, and his second-in-command are in Iranian custody after what the Ministry of Intelligence and Security is touting as a five-month operation.

“We had spread a dragnet and we managed to capture him,” said Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar, according to state radio. “He is now in the claws of justice. We were watching him and his agents, but we wanted to capture him alive.”

Iran has long claimed that Jundallah was backed by the United States as part of an ongoing proxy war meant to pressure the Islamic Republic. Iran’s Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi showed a photo of Abdulmalak Rigi on state television and said it was taken at the “headquarters of Americans in Afghanistan” 24 hours before his capture. Moslehi also showed an identity card and passport purporting to belong to Rigi that he said were issued by the U.S.

“We warn the U.S and British intelligence services that they should stop underwriting terrorists,” he said at a televised press conference. “We have strong evidence proving Abdulmalak Rigi was enjoying support from U.S., England and some other European countries.”

Coverage of same by RFE, BBC, NPR, MSNBC, NYT

Go to LA Times.

Iran has arrested seven members of Jundollah, a Sunni rebel group it has accused of carrying out bombings and terrorist activities, the semi-official Fars news agency said on Wednesday. Go to Reuters.

Eleven members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards force have been arrested in Pakistan after illegally entering the country, police there say.  They were detained in Mashkel near the Pakistan-Iran border, they added. Go to BBC.

Pakistan will help Iran hunt members of the Jundallah terrorist group responsible for attacks in the southern Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchistan, President Asif Ali Zardari told a visiting Iranian envoy.

The countries need coordinated intelligence to help fight the group, Zardari told Iran’s Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar in Islamabad, the official Associated Press of Pakistan reported. Go to Bloomberg.

Iran’s Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar is in Islamabad for meetings with his Pakistani counterpart over how to crack down on the Baluch rebel group Jundallah (Soldiers of God)…Iran has demanded that Islamabad hand over the group’s leader, Abdolmalek Rigi, who it says is hiding in Pakistan.  Tehran also wants Islamabad to join a coordinated sweep against Jundallah, which operates across the two countries’ porous border. But reaching agreement may prove difficult. Go to Radio Free Europe.

…”The emergence and rise of Jundollah coincide with the explosion of smuggling throughout the eastern edge of Iran,” said French historian Stephane Dudoignon, a leading Western expert on Sistan-Baluchestan.

The rise in smuggling after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 had particularly affected the impoverished region, he said in an e-mail interview. Go to Reuters.

…The accumulated problems in Sistan-Baluchistan are cultural, economic, ethnic, and sectarian, and cannot be permanently resolved by military force alone. What is needed is rather a fair allocation of resources and intensive development of public infrastructure (roads, electricity and water supplies).

Whether the cash-strapped central government, which is faced with multiple domestic challenges as a consequence of the controversial presidential election and economic ills and under increasing external pressure because of its nuclear program, will opt for this approach is open to question. Go to Radio Free Europe.

…Although I believe that Ahmadinejad’s government has no legitimacy in Iran, the fact remains that the U.S. and its allies have been trying for years to incite Iran’s ethnic and religious minorities to destabilize the country. To do so, the U.S., Britain, and Saudi Arabia appear to have turned to terrorist groups such as the Jundallah and PJAK. This is, of course, in total contradiction with the so-called “war on terror” that the U.S. is supposedly waging. Go to Tehran Bureau.