Iran has arrested an alleged “counter-revolutionary agent” on suspicion of carrying out an arson attack on a memorial to a revered general killed in a US drone strike, a judicial official says.

The statue of General Qassem Soleimani, who headed the Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, up to his death on January 3, 2020, was torched just hours after it was unveiled in the southwestern town of Shahrekord last week.

“The perpetrator of this shameful act has been arrested,” the judiciary chief of Chahar Mahal-Bakhtiari province, Ahmad-Reza Bahrami, tells the judiciary’s Mizan news website.

“The provincial courts will punish the perpetrator of this outrage as quickly as possible in accordance with sharia (Islamic law) and the law.”

The unveiling of the statue in Shahrekord was one of a number of commemorative events held last week to mark the second anniversary of Soleimani’s assassination.

Source » timesofisrael