Fire, explosion hit Iranian nuclear site
Facility produces centrifuges and is tightly guarded
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — A fire and an explosion struck a centrifuge production plant above Iran’s underground Natanz nuclear enrichment facility early Thursday, analysts said. The facility is one of the most tightly guarded sites in the Islamic Republic following earlier acts of sabotage there.
The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran sought to downplay the fire, calling it an “incident” that affected only an under-construction “industrial shed,” spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi said. However, both Kamalvandi and Iranian nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi rushed to Natanz, a facility targeted earlier by the Stuxnet computer virus and built underground to withstand enemy airstrikes, after the fire.
This event threatened to rekindle wider tensions across the Middle East, similar to the escalation in January after a U.S. drone strike killed a top Iranian general in Baghdad and Tehran launched a retaliatory ballistic missile attack targeting American forces in Iraq.
While offering no cause for Thursday’s blaze, Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency published a commentary addressing the possibility of sabotage by such enemy nations as Israel and the U.S. following other recent explosions in the country.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran has so far tried to prevent intensifying crises, and the formation of unpredictable conditions and situations,” the commentary said. But “the crossing of red lines of the Islamic Republic of Iran by hostile countries, especially the Zionist regime and the U.S., means that strategy … should be revised.”
The fire began around 2 a.m. local time in the northwest corner of the Natanz compound in Iran’s central Isfahan province, according to data collected by a U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite that tracks fires from space.
Images later released by Iranian state media show a two-story brick building with scorch marks and its roof apparently destroyed. Debris on the ground and a door that looked blown off its hinges.