Tasnim News Agency, which is affiliated to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, reported that more than 50 percent of seminary students and some of the teachers of Zahedan Makki Mosque are foreigners and Afghans.

This news agency wrote that over the past few months, 132 of these seminary students have been deported.

In May, the Taliban’s foreign ministry announced that 23 Afghan Sunni seminary students had been released from Zahedan prison and returned to Nimroz province of Afghanistan.

Tasnim stressed that these individuals have been “identified and within the framework of the regulations, after preliminary detention, had been deported and handed over to the authorities of their country”.

This news agency published a confession video of some of these seminary students and officials of the mosque. It is still unclear under what conditions their confessions were made.

After the death of university student, Mahsa Amini, by the Iranian police, Sistan and Baluchistan province turned into the center of protests against the Iranian government.

The Iranian regime considers some of the religious movements belonging to the Sunnis of Zahedan, who support Mawlawi Abdul Hamid, the Sunni preacher of Zahedan, to be involved in these protests.

Mawlawi Abdul Hamid has continuously criticised the Iranian government in his Friday prayer sermons in recent months.

According to reports, the Iranian government has increased pressure on Mawlawi Abdul Hamid and Makki Mosque officials to restrain the protests.

In the video published by Fars news agency, one of the Makki madrassa officials said that this madrassa has nearly a thousand seminary students and half of them are Afghans.