Police nab 19 for waving Taliban flag in Tehran

TEHRAN: Iranian police claimed to have apprehended 19 people after the flag of Afghanistan’s Taliban movement was waved at a gathering in a Tehran park.

While talking to media Tehran’s police chief Hossein Rahimi said the incident occurred at Mellat Park, in the north of the capital, during a gathering.

The police official further said unfortunately, some participants in the gathering started to wave the Taliban flag, adding that Afghan nationals attend such events each year.

According to reports,  pictures of the gathering were posted on social media and that some had claimed it involved “members of the terrorist Taliban group”.

It came during a three-day ceasefire in Afghanistan between the Taliban and Afghan security forces over the Muslim festival which ended on Sunday.

According to Rahimi, five of those arrested following investigations had “produced the flag, taken pictures and video and given them to hostile media”. The rest were “mostly illegal nationals who are being deported”, he added.

The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR, about 3.5 million Afghans, including almost one million refugees, live in the Islamic republic.

Tehran has long supported its co-religionists in neighboring Afghanistan, the Shiite Hazara minority who were violently persecuted by the Taliban during its rule in the 1990s.