When a large explosion lit up the skies on the edge of Tehran last week, the Iranian government quickly dismissed the episode as a gas explosion at the Parchin military base, which was once the focus of international nuclear inspectors.
It turned out to be false: Satellite photos show the blast occurred at a missile production facility not far from Parchin, a base with underground tunnels and has long been suspected of being a major site for Iran’s growing arsenal.
But beyond Tehran’s effort to deflect it (commercial satellite photos showed the blast marks of the blast and location), it’s unclear whether the cause was an accident, sabotage, or something else.
American and Israeli intelligence officials insist they had nothing to do with it.
But in Iran, where curing conspiracy theories is a national hobby, the vision of a major explosion in eastern Tehran was quickly fused on social media with the news of a power outage in Shiraz, nearly 600 miles to the south. Shiraz also has important military installations, and the explosion and blackout occurred within the same time on Friday.
There is no evidence that the incidents were related.
Nuclear inspectors visited Parchin’s military installations five years ago after years of clashes with Iranian authorities. The renovations at the facilities had been so extensive that they raised suspicions that the government may have been trying to hide previous work on nuclear detonation technologies.
After last week’s episode, Iranian news organizations were shown a small hole in an intact gas tank, which seemed like an unlikely explanation for an explosion so large that images of the flames, taken miles from the site, appeared on Twitter.
At the end of the weekend, aerial commercial photographs showed a burned hillside at the Khojir missile production complex in eastern Tehran, where liquid and solid propellants are made for Iran’s missile fleets.
“It seems likely that some kind of gas or liquid storage tank exploded,” said Fabian Hinz, an expert in the Iranian military at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies in Monterey, California. “Probably industrial gas is necessary for missile production,” he said, but the photos did not clarify. The main buildings in the missile production center seemed intact.
Iran’s missile program has long been a target of Israeli intelligence agencies. A major explosion in 2011, which killed a key architect of Iran’s missile program, is widely viewed as an act of sabotage.
But this explosion may have been different. Two Israeli intelligence services operating outside Israel’s borders, the Mossad and the Israel Defense Forces intelligence unit, said they were investigating the episode and had not yet reached a final conclusion on whether it was an accident or sabotage. But several officials insisted that Israel was not involved.
US officials also said they doubted it was a sabotage operation. Typically, Israel and the United States act in coordination on such covert missions, as they did with the cyber attack on Iran’s nuclear centrifuge facility in Natanz a decade ago.
A spokeswoman for the Israeli prime minister’s office declined to comment on whether Israel was involved in the blast, a standard response to such questions. An IDF spokesman also declined to comment.
Ronen Solomon of IntelliTimes, an intelligence blog, which was one of the first to identify the Khojir missile installation as the site of the explosion, said it caused “little damage.” But he noted that it was “a large facility,” and as part of the Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group, it has been subject to US economic sanctions.
If the explosion was an act of sabotage, some analysts noted, it was carefully designed not to invite retaliation because the damage was so minimal. But in the past, there have been small attacks designed to create fear among Iranians that foreign powers have insider information on the country’s delicate military programs.
Iran’s media tried to counter reports of the missile site, saying they were generated by “enemy media” eager to portray Iran’s missile bases as vulnerable to attack.
