July 24, 2020
An explosion that lit up the nighttime sky over Tehran came from an underground tunnel system believed to hide a missile assembly site, with satellite photographs showing the area charred by the explosion. The Pasdaran, however, announced it was a gas storage tank that blew up June 26.
It said the blast was near the town of Parchin, which is 20 kilometers from where the satellite photos showed the explosion to be. The Pasdaran said no one was injured or killed. The town of Parchin is just outside the huge Parchin military complex.
The fact that the Pasdaran announced an explosion that it said did not involve the Pasdaran had aroused suspicions immediately. The blast shook homes, rattled windows and lit up the horizon in the Alborz Mountains. Satellite photos taken 20 kilometers north of Parchin and 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) east of downtown Tehran showed an area of charred scrubland not seen in images taken the day before.
The explosion area sits near what analysts describe as the Khojir missile facility. The explosion appears to have struck a site belonging to the Shahid Bakeri Industrial Group, which makes solid-propellant rockets, Fabian Hinz, a researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California, told The Associated Press.
The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) identified Khojir as the “site of numerous tunnels, some suspected of use for arms assembly.” Large industrial buildings at the site visible from satellite photographs also suggest missile assembly being conducted there.
The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) says Iran overall has the largest underground facility program in the Middle East. Such sites “support most facets of Tehran’s ballistic missile capabilities, including the operational force and the missile development and production program,” the DIA said in 2019. Iran’s missile and space programs have suffered a series of explosions in recent years.
The most notable came in 2011, when a blast at a missile base west of Tehran killed Pasdar Gen. Hassan Tehrani-Moghaddam, who led Iran’s missile program, and 16 others. Initially, authorities described the blast as an accident, though a former prisoner later said the Pasdaran interrogated him on suspicion Israel caused the explosion.
While there is no certainly, most tend to believe the explosion was an accident that occurred when the Pasdaran were moving a large volume of explosive materials off the base