Iran blast near suspected missile site

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — An explosion that rattled Iran’s capital came from an area in the country’s eastern mountains that, analysts believe, hides an underground tunnel system and missile production sites, satellite photographs showed Saturday.

Friday’s explosion sent a massive fireball into the sky near Tehran. What blew up remains unclear, as does the cause of the blast.

The unusual response of the Iranian government in the aftermath of the explosion, however, underscores the sensitive nature of an area near where international inspectors believe the Islamic Republic conducted high-explosive tests two decades ago for nuclear weapon triggers.

The blast shook homes, rattled windows and lit up the horizon in the Alborz Mountains. State TV aired a segment from what it described as the site of the blast.

One of its journalists stood in front of what appeared to be large, blackened gas cylinders, though the camera remained tightly focused and did not show anything else around the site. Defence Ministry spokesman Davood Abdi blamed the blast on a leaking gas he did not identify and said no one was killed.

Abdi described the site as a “public area,” raising the question of why military officials and not civilian firefighters would be in charge. The state TV report did not answer that.

Satellite photos of the area, 20 kilometres east of downtown Tehran, showed hundreds of metres of charred scrubland.

The gas storage area sits near what analysts describe as Iran’s Khojir missile facility. The explosion appears to have struck a facility for the Shahid Bakeri Industrial Group, which makes solid-propellant rockets, said Fabian Hinz, of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.