The death toll of a blast which occurred in the southern Iranian city of Shiraz on Saturday night has risen to 11, the official IRNA news agency reported Sunday.
The bomb blast at the Shohada Hosseiniyeh mosque when a prominent local cleric was delivering a speech, and right now more than 191 people were injured, said the report.
Iranian media previously said 8 people were killed and more than 66 were wounded, but adding the number of the casualties could increase because some wounded were in critical condition.
No group or people have yet claimed responsible for the attack.
However, the cause of the blast is under suspicion because some local officials said it may not be an attack but an accident, while some others didn't rule out it was triggered by a bomb.
The explosion "may have been caused by explosives left behind from an earlier exhibition commemorating" the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, the state-run Press TV said in an earlier report.
According to the semi-official Fars news agency, Fars province police chief Commander Ali Moayeri said "the incident could have happened as a result of negligence since there was an exhibition commemorating the war not long ago."
"The munitions left at the site may have caused this explosion," he added.
Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told a weekly press conference on Sunday that "the investigation is underway...there was no firm stance by police right now," adding "prejudgments about the cause of the explosion must be avoided."
In the past few years, Iran has been hit by a string of bomb attacks which the authorities blamed on a Sunni group called Jundallah, mostly in its southeastern provinces bordering Pakistanand Afghanistan.
The latest major attack happened on Feb. 14 when 18 elite Revolutionary Guards were killed in a car explosion in Iran's southeastern city of Zahedan, capital of Sistan-Baluchestan province.
Source:Xinhua
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