Messages claiming Iran nuclear site fire deepen the mystery
An online video and messages purportedly claiming responsibility for a fire that analysts say damaged a centrifuge assembly plant at Iran's underground Natanz nuclear site deepened the mystery Friday around the incident.
The multiple, different claims by a self-described group called the “Cheetahs of the Homeland” included language used by several exiled Iranian opposition organizations, as well as focused almost entirely on Iran's nuclear program, viewed by Israel as a danger to its very existence.
The disparate messages, as well as the fact Iran experts had never heard of the group before, raised questions about whether Natanz again had faced sabotage by a foreign nation as it had during the Stuxnet computer virus outbreak believed to have been engineered by the US and Israel.
“If it is proven that our country has been attacked by cyberattacks, we will respond,” warned Gen Gholam Reza Jalali, the head of Iran's military unit in charge of combating sabotage, according to a report late Thursday by the Mizan news agency.
However, a released photo and video broadcast by Iranian state television of the site showed a two-story brick building with scorch marks and its roof apparently destroyed.
Debris on the ground and a door that looked blown off its hinges suggested an explosion accompanied the blaze.
The fire began around 2 am local time in the northwest corner of the Natanz compound in Iran's central Isfahan province, according to data collected by a U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite that tracks fires from space.
Iranian nuclear officials did not respond to a request for comment from the AP on the analysts' findings.
Before news of the fire became public, the BBC's Persian service says its journalists received emails from the self-proclaimed “Cheetahs of the Homeland” claiming an attack at Natanz.
A video claimed the group included “soldiers from the heart of regime's security organizations” who wanted to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Iran long has maintained its atomic program is for peaceful purposes.
However, the International Atomic Energy Agency has said Iran “carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device” in a “structured program” through the end of 2003.
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But the tone across the messages clashed, with one using terminology often associated with Iran's Mujahedeen-e-Khalq exile group and the video seemingly showing Iran's Shiite theocracy as worse than the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
The video also included part of the nationalist song “Ey Iran,” which reformists and opposition groups both sing.
The MEK and supporters of the shah's exiled son Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi did not respond to requests for comment.
The purported group's name, “the Cheetahs of the Homeland,” also struck some as odd, given that the “cheetahs” is a nickname of Iran's national football club. Ronen Bergman, an Israeli journalist who works with The New York Times and published a book on the Mossad titled “Rise and Kill First,” questioned why an Iranian opposition group would name itself that.
“It's highly unlikely that a serious opposition movement would use such a name, which is probably exactly what the people who came up with it, were aiming people to think,” Bergman wrote Friday on Twitter in English, without elaborating.
(Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com)
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