It was carried out with same method by which Israel’s Iranian proxy,
the Mujahedin-e Khalq, had assassinated an Iranian scientist in
mid-January. It occurred on the anniversary of the 2008 assassination of
Hezbollah operations chief Imad Mugniyeh, which Hezbollah had vowed to
avenge. And it happened at the same time as what appeared to be
attempted bombings in Bangkok and Tbilisi.
The evidence surrounding that bomb itself indicates a series of
decisions by the terrorist team that is fundamentally inconsistent with
an Iranian-Hezbollah revenge bombing. The preliminary forensic analysis
of the bomb itself had estimated it to be 250-300 grams of explosives, but sources in the investigation later reduced the estimate to 200-250 grams.
The 250-gram bomb that exploded near the Delhi High Court in May 2011
did not even damage the car under which it had been placed and was
characterised by Police Commissioner B K Gupta as a “low-intensity and mild blast”.
The main damage to the Israeli diplomat’s car was not from the
explosion but from the fire, which burned so slowly that the occupants
suffered no burns.
If the bomb had been filled with shrapnel of iron filings, nails or
glass, or if it had been attached underneath the fuel tank or on the
door next to the passenger, that bomb would have seriously injured or
killed the passenger, Tal Yehoshua-Koren, the wife of the Israeli
Defense Attaché. But Delhi police were able to determine that the bomb
contained no such potentially deadly shrapnel. And an examination of the videos and photos of the car after the bombing revealed that the bomb had been attached instead to the rear of the vehicle, where it would have the least impact on the occupants.
Indian investigators obtained a fourth piece of evidence bearing on
the intentions of the planners from their interview with Yehoshua-Koren.
She told them the bomb did not go off for 30 to 40 seconds
after she felt a bump from the rear of the car and saw the motorcyclist
go past her window. Indian investigators had assumed that the bomb had
operated on a five- or 10-second delay, like other magnet bombs with
which they were familiar – only enough time for the motorcyclist to get
far enough away from the blast.
Yehoshua-Koren did not get out of the car before the bomb went off, and suffered what the Israeli Defense Ministry called “moderate”
wounds – evidently from metal fragments from the rear hatch. She was
nevertheless able to exit the car and get to the Israeli Embassy without any assistance.
Israeli commentary on the bombing suggested that the Iranian-sponsored terrorist team had simply proven to be ineffective
in carrying out the bombing. But the combination of these four distinct
indicators strongly suggests that the operation was planned so that the
passenger in the car would not be injured.
Israel claimed that the evidence links the Delhi bombing to other
alleged Iranian-Hezbollah plots in Tbilisi and Bangkok. Deputy Prime
Minister Moshe Yaalon declared, “It is the same pattern, the same bomb, the same lab, the same factory”.
But it turns out that there was no similarity whatsoever among the bombs found in the three capitals. The one in Tbilisi was described as a grenade in a plastic bag taped to the bottom of the car, which hardly suggests a serious terror plot. Delhi police discovered
that the two magnet bombs found in the house in Bangkok, where an
accidental explosion had occurred, contained the much more powerful C-4
explosive as well as shrapnel – both of which were absent from the Delhi
bomb. And, even more interesting, the Bangkok magnet bombs timed for
only a five-second delay.
That information led investigators in Delhi to conclude that the operations in Delhi and Bangkok were “unrelated”.
Despite the fact that a group of Iranian passport-holders were
clearly involved with highly lethal bombs in Bangkok, there is good
reason to doubt that they were working for Iran’s IRGC or Hezbollah.
They spent their first three days in the country with Thai prostitutes at Pattaya. That profile suggests Iranian mercenaries, like the former kickboxer hired by Mossad to assassinate Iranian scientist Massoud Ali Mohammadi in January 2010, rather than Iranian or Hezbollah operatives.
In the larger context, it is very difficult to believe that Iran
would have chosen New Delhi as the location for revenge against Israel,
given the importance of India as a buyer of Iranian oil and India’s
delicately balanced political-diplomatic position in the larger
conflict.
India had just replaced China as Iran’s single biggest crude oil
customer, having increased its imports to roughly 550,000 barrels a day
in January, which compensated for a drop in sales to China. And the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had resisted
pressure from the United States and Europe to reduce its purchases from
Iran, even working with Iran to find ways to get around the planned
sanctions against Iran’s National Bank. India’s Commerce Ministry was planning a large business delegation to Iran to discuss increased trade.
India had thus taken on the role of potential “spoiler” in the Western sanctions strategy against Iran. This central geopolitical reality prompted New Delhi’s “Economic Times” to ask,
“Why would Iran go and poke its finger in the eye of its best customer,
especially knowing full well that Israel will use even the flimsiest
excuse to put the blame on it?”
Indeed, it was Israel, not Iran that stood to gain politically from
the terrorist car bomb in Delhi. Israel was well aware that a terrorist
bombing in Delhi that could be blamed on Tehran was a potential lever to
change India’s policy toward Iran. As an Israeli official told the Wall Street Journal,
if India were to adopt Netanyahu’s position that Iran was responsible
for the bombing, it would take the India-Iran relationship to “a whole
different level”.
Nearly two weeks before the bombing, Israel acted to ensure that
Indians would assume that a terrorist attack in Delhi on that date had
been carried out by Iran. A letter to the Delhi police
on February 1 signed by the Israeli Deputy Chief of Mission in Delhi
and the First Secretary responsible for security expressed concern that
Iran and Hezbollah would take revenge on the anniversary of the Mugniyeh
assassination by carrying out terrorist actions against Israelis. It
also referred to the possibility of Iranian revenge for the
assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist Mustafa Ahmadi Roshan on
January 11. Although the letter did not specify that an attack might
take place in Delhi, Mossad chief Tamir Pardo led a delegation of intelligence officials on a visit to Delhi around the same time and turned over a list of 50 Iranian nationals with the request that they be kept under surveillance.
The Israeli letter referred to an alleged Hezbollah terror plot
against Israelis that had been broken up in Bangkok in January. But the
idea of a Hezbollah plan to kill Israelis in Thailand had come only from Israeli intelligence
– not from any local sources. The Thai police detained Hussein Atris, a
Swedish-Lebanese, in January only because Israeli intelligence
officials had told them they “suspected” that he and two other Lebanese,
whom they claimed were linked to Hezbollah, might carry out terrorist
attacks at tourist sites popular with Israelis.
Atris admitted to owning large supplies of urea fertiliser and
ammonium nitrate, which are ingredients in bombs, but Thai investigators
concluded that they were not connected to any terror plot in Thailand,
because of the absence of any other bomb components. The head of Thailand’s National Security Council, General Wichean Potephosree, a former chief of police, expressed doubt that Atris was a terrorist, as Israel had claimed.
After the Bangkok explosion, the Israelis renewed the claim of an
Iran-Hezbollah terror threat in Bangkok, alleging that the bombs found
in in all three capitals in mid-February were “exactly the same kind of devices”. But we now know that was not the case.
We may never be able to establish with certainty what happened in
Delhi, Bangkok and Tbilisi earlier this month, but the evidence that has
come to light thus far doesn’t support the widely accepted notion that
Iran and Hezbollah were behind it. That evidence is consistent, however,
with a clever Israeli “false flag” car bombing operation that would not
injure the passenger but would serve its broader strategic interests:
dividing India from Iran and pushing US public opinion further towards
support for war against Iran.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
