WarSclerotic

Mysterious explosion kills 7, in… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.

(Not ALL the news is bad! – JW)

    A mysterious explosion took place in a steel factory in Iran overnight Sunday, killing seven people, the latest in a series of blasts that have rocked the Islamic Republic over the last month.

The deaths occurred in an explosion and subsequent fire at a steel factory in the central Iranian province of Yadz, Iran’s IRIB news agency quoted Yazd Governor Azizollah Seifi as saying on Monday. He said that some of the those killed in the blast were foreign nationals.
Meridor: Not every Iran blast is reconnaissance

The cause of the explosion was not immediately clear but reports over the years have indicated the existence of covert nuclear facilities in the city of Yazd and it’s surrounding areas.

While there was no evidence available to support this possibility, Iran has used seemingly innocent civilian factories before to hide its illicit nuclear activity.

Some reports have claimed that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps had built underground nuclear facilities in the Yazd region. The Iranians are known to have a mine there used to extract raw uranium and that a nearby facility is where the uranium is turned into yellowcake a key component in the nuclear fuel cycle.

It is also possible that the steel facility was strictly a steel facility without a military or nuclear application. It is possible though that the factory manufactured steel parts for missiles or even centrifuges, used to enrich uranium. In either case, sabotaging such a facility could contribute to efforts aimed at delaying Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.

The blast on Sunday night came after, last month, a mysterious explosion took place in the city of Isfahan, which is home to a nuclear facility involved in processing uranium fed to the Natanz fuel enrichment facility.

The London Times reported that the explosion had damaged the nuclear facility but the Institute for Science and International Security in the United States published satellite images which showed extensive work underway at the facility but not damage from an explosion.

Two weeks earlier, on November 12, an explosion hit an Iranian military base near the town of Bid Kaneh, killing 17 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Maj.-Gen. Hassan Moghaddam, chief architect of the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile program.

Israel’s Mossad was accused of orchestrating the blast which took place as the officers were reportedly assembling an advanced long-range ballistic missile. The explosion is believed to have significantly delayed the development of that missile.

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