Mystery blast rattles Tehran

Area long suspected of containing missile production sites

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

What exploded early Friday, sending a fireball into the sky near Tehran, remains unclear, as does the cause of the blast.

The unusual response of the Iranian government 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 later 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, but the camera remained tightly focused and did not show anything else around the site. Defense Ministry spokesman Davood Abdi blamed the blast on a leaking gas he did not identify and said no one was killed in the explosion.

Abdi described the site as a “public area,” raising the question of why military officials and not civilian firefighters would be in charge.

Satellite photos of the area, some 12.5 miles east of downtown Tehran, showed hundreds of yards of charred scrubland not seen in previous images of the area. The building near the char marks resembled the facility seen in the state TV footage.

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, a researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.

The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies identified Khojir as the “site of numerous tunnels, some suspected of use for arms assembly.” Large industrial buildings at the site visible from satellite photographs also suggest missile assembly being conducted there.