Guard commander killed by roadside bomb

An Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander who was once involved in the detainment of American sailors in the Persian Gulf has been killed in a roadside bomb near the Syrian capital, the paramilitary force said yesterday. Colonel Davoud Jafari had been deployed to Syria in a military advisory role and was working for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps aerospace arm, which develops and operates Iran’s ballistic missile programme. He was killed with ‘‘a makeshift bomb planted by the roadside near Damascus by associates of the Zionist [Israeli] regime,’’ the IRGC said on its website.