The hanging of wanted anti-Iran Sunni separatist leader Abdul Malik Rigi in Tehran in June 2010, within five months of his capture, attracted dim media attention then. Fourteen years after he founded an armed group, Jundallah — rechristened as Jaish al-Adl (JAA) or the ‘Army of Justice’ in 2012 following a ban by the U.S. — brought two major military powers, Iran and Pakistan, to the brink of war last week.
Rigi was believed to be behind the killing of 154 members of the Iranian Armed Forces between 2003 and 2010 in southwest Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan region. In 2010, Iranian fighter jets forced the landing of a passenger aircraft to arrest Rigi, as he was travelling from the UAE to Kyrgyzstan.
“The only thing we ask of the Iranian government is to let us be citizens. We want to have the same rights as the Iranian Shias. That’s it. We do not want discrimination between Sunnis and Shias in this country,” Rigi was quoted as saying in an interview with Al-Arabiya in 2008.
