in February, rejecting his defense that he had not known about any plan for an attack.
Masud Sedaghat-zadeh, 31, will be sent back to Thailand unless his lawyers file an appeal within 15 days, prosecution lawyers said. He is believed to have coordinated a bomb plot planned for three countries in Asia that month.
Meanwhile, news reports from India say that Indian police have reported the magnetic strips used to attach a bomb to an Isareli car in Delhi are identical to the magnetic strips found on a bomb attached to an Isareli car in Georgia that same day and the magnetic strips found in the Bangkok house that blew up the next day.
Sedaghat-zadeh was arrested in Malaysia the day after the Bangkok blasts as he attempted to board a flight to Iran.
Three bombs went off in Bangkok February 14. The first was apparently an accidental blast at a house that Sedaghat-zadeh was sharing with two other Iranian suspects. Another bomb was thrown at a taxi by one of the other Iranians and a third blew off his leg before he was arrested by Thai police.
The third Iranian from the house was arrested at Bangkok’s main airport after Sedaghat-zadeh had fled to Malaysia.
The previous day in the Indian capital, a bomber traveling by motorcycle attached an explosive device to the car of an Israeli diplomat’s wife, wounding here. That attack came hours after an attempt to bomb an Israeli embassy car in Tbilisi, Georgia. That bomb was found before it went off.
Police in both India and Thailand believe all three bomb plots are linked.
Sedaghat-zadeh pleaded innocent in a Malaysian court. “He said he wasn’t involved. He doesn’t know about the bomb and all that,” said his defense lawyer, Mohamad Nashir Hussin. “He was only associating with those people involved, but he doesn’t know that they were involved in the other activities. He didn’t know.”
According to The Guardian of London, Indian investigative agencies have now told the cabinet they have concrete evidence the bombing there was the work of an Iranian “security entity.” Their conclusions have not yet been made public officially as Indian officials are reluctant to blame Tehran and have forbidden the police to discuss publicly any foreign links to the bombing.
European intelligence officials told The Guardian they find it difficult to judge Tehran’s “risk calculus.” They fail to see a rational judgment of a state behind the bomb plot.
One intelligence official said. “It’s very hard to see the logic behind [the February bombings], other than perhaps to demonstrate an ability to cause problems in the event of war or a desire for revenge of some kind.”
Tehran has insisted the Delhi bombing was a “false flag” operation by enemies of the Islamic Republic. The suggestion that Israel would seek to kill the wife of one of its own military officers to make political hay falls flat around the world.
Police evidence, witness statements and court documents that The Guardian says it has seen, plus interviews with Indian and international law enforcement and security officials, indicate the attempted three-country bombing on February 13 and 14 was conducted by a well coordinated network of about a dozen Iranians and prepared over at least 10 months.
The evidence includes the identification of at least 10 Iranians, money transfers to key individuals from Iran, the use of Iranian phone connections and the flight following the attacks by conspirators to Iran.
“The question is not was this Iran-backed or Iran-organized but who in Iran was running all this,” said one western security official.
The Guardian quoted Indian investigators as saying the first elements of the plot were put in place in April 2011 when at least five Iranians traveled to Thailand and India, presumably on reconnaissance missions.
Their journeys came around four months after a spike in tension between Iran, Israel and the West following the killing in Tehran of Majid Shahriari, a nuclear scientist, by a bomb stuck to his vehicle by a motorcyclist. They also followed the revelations about the computer worm Stuxnet, which infected Iran’s uranium enrichment plant in Natanz.
Travel documents, phone records, police inquiries and customs data show how, in a series of trips over the summer and autumn of 2011, apartments were rented, local helpers recruited, transport arranged, finances organized and targets surveilled.
Houshang Afshar Irani has been identified by Indian police as the man who attached a magnetic charge to the car of the wife of the Israeli defense attachÈ in Delhi. Copies of his passport show he first visited the city in April 2011 for 10 days before returning on January 29 this year. At 11:30 p.m. February 13, almost seven hours after reaching the Indian capital’s main airport 75 minutes after the bomb attack, he flew to Malaysia, then Dubai and on to Tehran.
Analysis by Indian investigators of the type of explosive used in Delhi have revealed it to be a variant of TNT. The shell of the bomb was manufactured outside India and magnetic strips used to attach the device to the car in Delhi were identical to those recovered in Bangkok and Tbilisi.
The attack in Bangkok involved at least five people, all Iranians. One, a 31-year-old woman identified as Leila Rohani, visited Thailand twice in 2012 and rented the house that was partly destroyed when 28-year-old Saeed Moradi, also Iranian, appears to have prematurely detonated a device. Moradi, who suffered serious injuries, was arrested. From Bangkok, Rohani traveled to Kuala Lumpur and then on to Tehran, investigators have found.
A second alleged conspirator was detained at the Bangkok airport, also en route for Tehran. The third man, Sedaghat-zadeh, who was detained in Malaysia, is believed to be the overall coordinator of the international operation.
As in Delhi, a reconnaissance trip also appears to have been conducted in Thailand in April 2011. Members of the cell were pictured with bar girls in the sleazy resort of Pattaya days before the blast.
Details of the Tbilisi plot and its links to the other two attacks are less detailed. Indian investigators say the mobile phone number used by Irani, the alleged Delhi bomber, during his 2011 visit to India was also used in June 2011 in the Georgian capital, linking the two plots.