Iran says Natanz explosion was an ‘act of sabotage’

The Iranian Atomic Energy Organization says that an “act of sabotage” was behind an explosion in the country’s Natanz nuclear facility last month, according to Iran’s al-Alam television.

The July 2 blast, which foreign media reports have attributed to Israel or the US, and which is said by some experts to have significantly set back Iran’s nuclear program, damaged an advanced centrifuge development and assembly plant.

An Iranian news website late last month named a suspect that authorities are claiming caused the explosion.

According to a report by “Didban Iran” (“Iran Watch”), the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps concluded that the instigator of the blast was Ershad Karimi, a contractor at the site who owns a company, MEHR, that supplies precision measuring equipment.

According to a New York Times report, the blast was most likely the result of a bomb planted at the facility, potentially at a strategic gas line. The report did not rule out the possibility that a cyber attack was used to cause a malfunction that led to the explosion.

The explosion was one of a series of mysterious blasts at Iranian strategic sites in recent weeks, which have largely been attributed to either Washington or Jerusalem, or both.