A blast outside the Israeli embassy in New Delhi on Friday damaged cars but did not cause injuries, police said. Israeli authorities were treating the explosion as a suspected attack and was stepping up security precautions at missions around the world.
The area around the embassy was sealed off after the explosion and police and bomb disposal experts took over the scene. A police statement described it as a “very low-intensity improvised device” that blew out the windows on three nearby cars and said a preliminary investigation “suggests a mischievous attempt to create a sensation.”
Israeli missions have already been on alert around the world in the wake of the assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist in November of last year. Tehran has blamed Israel and promised revenge.
In 2012 the wife of Israel’s defense attaché to India was moderately injured after a motorcyclist attached a bomb to her car near the embassy. Iran was suspected in the Delhi attack at that time also.
It was part of a series of attempted attacks against Israeli targets around the world attributed to Iran.
There was speculation that those incidents were in response to Israel’s alleged assassinations of multiple Iranian nuclear scientists as Jerusalem fought to curtail Iran’s nuclear program.
In addition a letter has also been found near the scene of the explosion which spoke of the deaths of “martyrs” Qassem Soleimani — Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) commander who was killed in a January 2020 United States drone strike — and Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the chief architect of Iran’s nuclear program, killed in a November 2020 attack Tehran has blamed on Israel.
So is it Tehran’s hand behind the Delhi Blast?
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