Iran is looking at a possible sabotage following blasts at several key sites, including the country’s main nuclear facility, deepening the mystery around these incidents after other authorities initially sought to play down any suggestion of foul play.
“Considering we are in a serious economic war with the United States and we have conflicts in various fields, the first hypothesis is that these accidents could be a threat and caused by the enemy’s moves,” Gholam Reza Jalali, the head of Iran’s Civil Defence Organisation, told state television on the weekend.
Hostile action by “anti-revolutionary elements” was also a possibility, General Jalali said, referring to domestic opposition groups.
General Jalali didn’t directly blame anyone for the blasts but said the country would respond if it were proved that Iran was hit by cyberattacks. He didn’t say what action might be taken.
A spokesman for Iran’s Supreme National Security Council said the cause of the accident at the nuclear site wouldn’t be immediately announced due to security considerations.
An explosion occurred on Thursday at Natanz, the site of Iran’s biggest uranium-enrichment facility, causing damage to a building identified by experts and diplomats as an advanced centrifuge assembly plant. The week before, a blast hit a Defence Ministry facility near a military site that has been crucial for Iran’s development of missiles and munitions. The ministry attributed the explosion to an industrial gas tank in a civilian area of Parchin.
Read the article by Aresu Eqbali and Isabel Coles in The Australian (from The Wall Street Journal).