A high-ranking Iranian army commander was killed Saturday morning while on his way to work, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
Brig. Gen. Ali Sayyad Shirazi, deputy chief of the joint staff command of the armed forces, was a senior army commander during Iran's 1980-88 war with Iraq, the agency said. He was assassinated by "terrorists," a common euphemism for the Iraq-based opposition group Mujahedeen Khalq.
The agency did not say how Shirazi was killed.
The Associated Press in Cairo received a telephone call Saturday from a Mujahedeen Khalq spokesman in Paris, who said the group's units inside Iran were responsible for the killing.
Spokesman Shahin Gobadi read a statement saying Shirazi was a "war criminal" who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of opposition members.
He said he did not yet have details about how Shirazi was killed, only that he was being escorted by heavily armed bodyguards at the time.
The head of Iran's paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Rahim Safavi, vowed to avenge Shirazi's death, the agency reported.
"The IRGC and the army of the Islamic Republic of Iran will exact a terrible revenge on the terrorists who martyred Gen. Sayyad Shirazi," Safavi told the agency.
The Mujahedeen Khalq is working to oust Iran's clerical regime. It claimed responsibility for the August death of Assadollah Lajevardi, a former Iranian chief prosecutor and head of Iran's Prisons Organization.
Violence has been on the rise in Iran during the past year amid an intensifying power struggle between moderates and conservatives in the Islamic government.
In January, the Intelligence Ministry acknowledged that some of its rogue agents had been behind last year's murders of five dissidents and writers.