India Vows to Find Person behind Israel Attack as Diplomat has Surgery
Indian investigators were searching Tuesday for the motorcycle assailant who attached a bomb to an Israeli diplomatic car in the heart of New Delhi, an attack the Jewish state blamed on Iran or its proxies, including Hizbullah.
Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram told reporters investigators were working on the assumption it was a terror attack carried out by a "very well-trained person."
Chidambaram said investigators would not stop working until they found those responsible for the attack, which wounded four people, including the wife of an Israeli diplomat.
The diplomat, named Tal Yehoshua Koren, is also the wife of Israel's defense attache in New Delhi, and was on her way to collect her children from school, officials said.
She had shrapnel removed from her spine, doctors said Tuesday.
"She has sustained multiple shrapnel injuries. Because of the explosion, sharp metal objects were found in her liver, lungs and spinal cord," Arun Bhanot, a doctor at the Primus Hospital in Delhi, told reporters.
"The major problem was in the spinal cord," he said. "The shrapnel was causing pressure in the nerve. She was having a problem in the left foot but now they (the shrapnel) have all been removed."
Israel has blamed Iran and Hizbullah for the attack and a failed strike in Georgia that has ratcheted already heightened tensions between Tehran and the Jewish state.
Iran denied responsibility, and India, a strong ally of Iran and a large market for its oil, declined to cast blame.
"At the moment, I am not pointing a finger at any particular group or any particular organization. But whoever did it, we condemn it in the strongest terms," Chidambaram said.
In Tbilisi, an Israeli embassy employee found a bomb on his car and contacted police who were able to defuse the device before it detonated, according to Georgia's interior ministry.
The method used in the attacks resembles the tactics of assassins who have been targeting Iranian nuclear scientists with magnetic bombs placed on their vehicles.
Three scientists and a physicist have been killed in the past two years in murders blamed by Iran on Israeli and U.S. secret services.
"There have been all kinds of mysterious things happening in Iran, and it could be an Iranian counterattack," said Mike Herzog, a retired Israeli general and former top aide to Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. "It's no secret that Iran uses Hizbullah globally, and Hizbullah has the capacity to carry out attacks around the globe."
On Sunday, Hizbullah marked the anniversary of the 2008 assassination of one of its military commanders, Imad Mughniyeh, in a bombing widely believed to have been carried out by Israel.
Source: Agence France Presse, Associated Press
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