India’s counterterrorism agencies have concluded that a local Shi’ite terrorist cell supported by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force was responsible for the explosion outside the Israeli embassy in New Delhi in late January, the Hindustan Times reported on Sunday.

The report said that although “deliberate false-flag cybermarkers were left by the perpetrators,” implicating the Islamic state, the counterterrorism agencies are clear that the blast was carried out as part of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps war against Israel.

“That the bomb was not of high intensity, with no human targets in mind was perhaps because the Iranians did not want to run afoul of a friendly nation like India,” one counterterror source said. “But the message was clear and the threat is real.”

False cybermarkers were left in Afghanistan both prior to and after the attack so that the true culprits could be firewalled, the report said.

The incendiary device used in the explosion was initially thought to be improvised and the work of an amateur but was later discovered to more sophisticated than first appeared – a remote-controlled device triggered by a bomber with a line of sight.

Investigators said that a threatening letter addressed to Israel’s ambassador to India Ron Malka found near the blast site that referenced Iranian “martyrs” was written by an Iranian, based on the style of writing and spellings of names.

In 2012, Iranian Quds Force agents placed a bomb under the car of an Israeli diplomat in New Delhi, wounding four people, including the diplomat’s wife.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)