ANKARA, Turkey -- Dealing their second blow to the Khomeini regime in less than a week, guerrillas bombed the headquarters of the military command in Tehran Saturday, killing the revolutionary prosecutor-general who supervised Iran's recent wholesale execution of dissidents.
Tehran radio said the prosecutor, Ayatollah Ali Qoddousi, 49, was killed and at least two other people injured in the blast and fire that swept through a section of the military command complex at 8:40 a.m. (1:10 a.m. EDT) in northeastern Tehran.
At the same time, the radio, monitored in Ankara, said that national police chief Col. Houshang Vahid Dastgerdi died of the wounds he suffered in the bomb blast that killed President Mohammed Ali Rajai and Prime Minister Mohammed Javad Bahonar last Sunday.
The report was the first word that Dastgerdi also was a victim of the blast. A number of people, including several employees of the prime minister's office, have been arrested and changed with plotting the explosion.
The radio also said a religious leader, Hossein Bagheri, was shot to death by 'American mercenaries' in the Kurdish province capital of Sanandaj Friday night.
Moving quickly, the Islamic regime named another mullah, Hojatoleslam Seyyed Hussein Musavi-Tabrizi, revolutionary prosecutor for Azerbajan province, to replace the slain Qoddousi.
The official Pars news agency said Qoddousi, 49, was killed by an incendiary bomb similar to the one that killed Rajai and Bahonar.
Qoddousi died in the hospital of 'severe brain injuries' 5 hours after the blast, a hospital spokesman said.
A Revolutionary Guard spokesman said firemen were digging through the rubble to retrieve documents and 'make sure no one is buried under the debris.'
In another incident, Tehran radio said one person was wounded and a number of others arrested in a shootout with Revolutionary Guards in front of the parliament building in Tehran.
The prosecutor general and the national police chief were the latest officials to die in a wave of assassinations that has claimed more than 80 lives since Abolhassan Bani-Sadr was ousted from the presidency June 22.
The government did not immediately say if it suspected any particular group in the bombing, but leftist Mojahideen Khalq guerrillas battling the Islamic regime have been blamed for nearly all the recent killings.
Qoddousi, a Shiite clergy leader, was the chief instrument of Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's crackdown on dissidents. Revolutionary courts under Qoddousi' command have executed at least 659 people for political offenses since Bani-Sadr's downfall.
Nearly 4,000 other dissidents have been arrested in that time.
Tehran radio said the bomb was planted in a library one floor below Qoddousi's office in the joint armed forces command headquarters.
A police spokesman said the blast struck at the center of the building, which also houses the Navy headquarters, military revolutionary courts and an army base.
Other sources reached by telephone said the blast brought the roof down on Qoddousi's office.