(Bloomberg) -- Oman said six people were killed in an attack on a Shiite Muslim mosque in Muscat, a rare incident of violence in the Gulf nation that the Islamic State terror group later claimed.
A policeman and five other people were killed and 28 others were wounded in the attack, the state-run Oman News Agency said. Three perpetrators were also killed. The agency said the incident was still being investigated.
SITE, an organization which tracks jihadist channels, said the al-Qaeda offshoot Islamic State claimed the attack in a Telegram post. The group said three of its members opened fire at a gathering for Shiite Muslims and exchanged fire with security forces in the Wadi Al-Kabeer area. Bloomberg was not immediately able to verify the statement.
Islamic State’s attacks in the Middle East have remained mostly focused in Syria, against government forces and their allies. The incident in Muscat comes at a volatile time in the region, with the war in Gaza entering its 10th month and mounting concern that another war between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, designated a terrorist group by the US, could ignite at any moment.
Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on the X social media site that four of its nationals were killed in what it said was a “dastardly terrorist attack on the Ali bin Abi Talib mosque.” Another 30 Pakistanis were receiving treatment, it said.
The shooting came on the eve of Ashoura, a day of commemoration for Shiite Muslims, which are typically a minority in most of the Gulf Arab states.
Oman’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Badr Albusaidi expressed his condolences to the families of those killed in “the brutal attack.”
Some Gulf countries witnessed attacks on Shiite mosques after the rise of Islamic State, which seized swaths of land in Iraq and Syria in 2014. A US-led coalition has extensively diminished the size of the group, which claimed a deadly attack in Moscow earlier this year.
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(Updates with Islamic State claim)
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