A series of bombing attempts in three different countries has set into motion investigations to unravel the threads of the mystery. So far, those investigations have not produced much.
It all began February 13 in Tbilisi, Georgia, where a bomb was found
under the car of a Georgian employee of the Israeli embassy. Authorities in Tbilisi were able to diffuse the bomb, but law enforcement in New Delhi, India, didn’t have that luck.
That same day, the wife of the Israeli embassy’s defense attaché was on her way to the American school in Delhi to pick up her children when a man on a red motorcycle approached her car and slapped something onto the back. The motorcycle sped away and disappeared without a trace. The driver of the car and his passenger had been trained and knew what had happened. The driver braked to a stop and his passenger, Tal Yehoshua Koren, was halfway out of the vehicle when the bomb went off.
The car’s driver and Ms. Koren were injured, with the latter’s legs currently paralyzed.
She was not able to identify the motorcyclist, seeing only his helmet before she bolted from the car. Witnesses in the car behind hers said the rider wore a brown jacket and rode a red motorcycle.
The Indian police have had no luck so far in finding or identifying the motorcyclist. There was no CCTV footage of the attack scene, despite being just a few hundred meters from the prime minister’s house. A check of red motorcycles has produced many red motorcycles, but no links to the bombing.
Police in distant Hyderabad said they were keeping watch on local Iranians on their own initiative. Hyderabad has a sizeable population of Iranians, comprised mostly of immigrants who came to the area decades ago. The central government does not seem to suspect resident Iranians. But it has no central database of visas, so the check of recent Iranian arrivals in India is a needle-in-a-haystack hunt through paper records at dozens of airports and road crossings.
The Indians are working a delicate balance in the investigation that is thought to involve Iran – an Iranian citizen or a member of the Iran-sponsored Hezbollah – because the target was an Israeli. The Indian government has directed its police officials to double-check all of its evidence before reaching any conclusion and not to name any country.
A cabinet minister said the investigation “has nothing to do with the India-Iran relationship,” adding: “As far as Iran is concerned, our stand is clear. India has made its stand clearÖ. We would like to keep good relations with all other countries.”
Police officials said the bomb was the first magnetic bomb to be used in India – but they said it was attached on the wrong part of the car.
“Usually, these bombs are fitted underneath the fuel tank for maximum impact. But the attacker had fitted the sticky bomb on the wrong side. Hence, it was a low-scale blast,” said a police officer.
Meanwhile, Thai authorities have gone further and have so far linked five Iranians to a bombing attempt gone awry in an upscale Bangkok neighborhood.
The Bangkok bomb plot started when a 29-year-old woman named Leila Rohani rented a two-story house on a side street in an upscale neighborhood. She flew out of Thailand February 5 and was succeeded by a bombing team of perhaps five Iranian men who flew into the country posing as tourists. They went to the Pattaya resort, sleazy and notorious for its red-light district, situated just an hour’s flight from Bangkok.
First to check into the six-story Top Thai hotel was Saied Moradi, who was carrying a heavy backpack. After checking in, he called Mohammad Khazai, who arrived at his hotel carrying a similarly heavy load. The two men were well dressed and pleasant with the hotel staff.
“Mr. Moradi was good-looking and dressed neatly, like a young entrepreneur,” said a hotel employee. “He was also polite. I could not believe he was a bomber.”
The men only left their room in the evening. Khazai approached a prostitute, named Nan, and asked her to show him around because he did not speak English fluently. Nan found companions for Khazai, Moradi and their third companion, Masud Sedaghat-zadeh, and the company hit a Middle Eastern-themed establishment where they puffed on hookahs, lounged around with the ladies and drank. Nan would also took a photo of the group on her cell phone, a crucial piece of evidence that establishes the link between the three men. The photo shows a beer bottle on the table they are sitting at. Two of the men are cradling women in their arms.
On the following Monday – as the attacks were unfolding in Tbilisi and New Delhi – the men left Pattaya’s red-light attractions for the house that Rohani had rented in Bangkok. They were later joined by a fourth, older-looking man surveillance videos show with a white beard who was later identified as 57-year-old Shayan Ali-Akbar Nouruzi.
Things went out of kilter at 2 p.m. the next afternoon when an explosion blew off part of the roof of the house. At least three men were seen running out. Khazai and Sedaghat-zadeh managed to flee but the third, Moradi, 28, only managed to stagger into the street. He was bloody and apparently disoriented, attempting to flag a taxi. When the cabbie saw the wounded man and accelerated away, Moradi threw a bomb at the vehicle. Moments later he threw another at a police patrol car that was approaching him. It hit something, bounced back and exploded near Moradi, blowing off one of his legs and injuring the other so badly it later had to be amputated. Four Thais were also injured in the blasts.
Thai authorities have detained Moradi, 28, in the hospital, and Khazai, 42, who was arrested at the airport trying to leave Thailand. Sedaghat-zadeh, 31, did get out of Thailand, but was later arrested in Malaysia trying to book a flight to Iran. Thailand is seeking his extradition. Thai courts have also issued warrants for the woman, Rohani, 32, and the older man, Nouruzi, who is believed to have returned to Iran.
“There are many theories,” said government spokesman Thitima Chaisaeng. But there is no direct evidence the men intended to target Israeli citizens. That is so far just an assumption.
Thai police found additional bombs made by the suspects in their residential bomb factory. All used C4 explosive, commonly used for rock blasting, and easily available in Thailand. The police said the transistor radios used for detonating the bombs were not sold in Thailand, and were likely brought in by the suspects. The detonators were set to explode five seconds after a bomb was fixed to a target, giving the bomb-planter very little time to get away—and giving the occupant of a targeted car very little time to get out.
Police also found stickers with the word “sejeal” plastered on walls and poles in the city. A bag containing 300 such stickers was recovered from the two-story house the suspects used as a bomb factory. One such sticker was also found under the seat of the blue motorcycle used by Sedaghat-zadeh.
Authorities theorized the stickers were used to mark a possible attack route in the city, although in the era of GPS satellite navigation that would be stunningly old-fashioned and unsophisticated. The word “sejeal” is an Arabic term for a kind of stone that is well known to Muslims from the Fil chapter in the Qoran. But what that means—if anything—in terms of the Bangkok scheme in unknown.
Still, Police Chief Gen. Prewpan Dhamapong believes the “target was specific and aimed at Israeli diplomatic staff.”
He said he based his conclusion on the fact that the “sticky bombs” his team recovered from the suspects’ hideout were the same as the one used in New Delhi.
However, Indian police say there has been no communication with Thai or Georgian police investigators. And they say C4 was not used in the New Delhi bomb. At their last briefing for reporters, the Indian police said they were still awaiting lab reports on the exact nature of the explosive.
The only point that Georgian, Indian and Thai police have made that is identical in all three bomb plots is that all had magnets to attach the bombs to targets.
Thai officials also said the bombs were small and thus intended for individual targets, not a mass terrorist attack meant to inflict numerous casualties. That comment was clearly intended to counter tourist fears of large-scale terrorist attacks. Thailand’s annual revenues from tourism are $25 billion and the authorities have constantly made comments denying any threat to tourists.
As is normally the case with incidents like these, the speculation tends to reach beyond the evidence. For starters, Israel accused Iran of orchestrating the attacks, while Iran shot back to say that it was Israel itself that was killing its own citizens to tarnish the Islamic Republic’s reputation.
“Western officials and Zionists seek to blame Iran for the recent terrorist attacks. This is while Iran is the biggest victim of terrorism and, from Iran’s point of view, Zionists are the biggest perpetrators of terrorist attacks in the world,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast.
A few Indian analysts had a completely different take – they blamed the intelligence agency of archrival Pakistan, the preferred guilty party for anything that goes wrong in India.
“In fact, it suits the ISI [Pakistani intelligence agency] to have conducted such an attack as it could achieve two goals: to attack the Israelis – which will earn them appreciation from various jihadi outfits and Islamic fundamentalist groups all over the world – and also to create a wedge between India and Iran, which have good relations,” Ved Marwah, security analyst and former Delhi police chief said.
Iran’s Mehr news agency reported that a leader of the Shia community in Thailand, Syed Suleiman Husaini, accused the Mojahedin-e Khalq of being behind the Bangkok bomb plot. Husaini is also director of the Islamic studies center at al-Mahdi Institute and former president of the Iran University Alumni Association. Husaini did not cite any evidence for his allegations.
The Lebanese Hezbollah, which has been cited as a suspect by others, roundly rejected those allegations. Hassan Nasrollah, Hezbollah’s leader, called the allegations absurd and said his group would have chosen a more significant target, not just solitary individuals. Hezbollah’s previous attacks have tended to be grandiose and take pride in the large number of casualties inflicted.