Explosion at Iranian power station joins growing list of mysterious blasts

Sunday’s incident is the latest in a string of fires and explosions at military and civilian sites across Iran.

By Paul Shindman, World Israel News

An explosion at a power plant in the central Iranian province of Isfahan on Sunday caused no injuries, but joins a growing list of mysterious blasts over the past month in the Islamic Republic.

The official IRNA news agency reported a large transformer exploded at a power station in the city of Isfahan but that the damage was being repaired and the power supply was uninterrupted.

There have been several mysterious explosions and fires at Iranian military, nuclear and industrial facilities over the past several weeks.

Also on Sunday, the BBC’s Persian language news service published satellite images of where a large fire reportedly took place in the Garmdareh area west of the capital Tehran earlier this month, where Iranian authorities had denied anything took place.

The burned-out area covers about 22,000 square meters, almost three times the size of a football field showing that a fire did occur in Garmadreh around the same time as there were reports on July 11 of “the sound of an explosion” in the area west of Tehran.

Clearer images provided to the BBC of the burn site showed no signs of damage to buildings or the effects of the explosion, but “show black areas in front of a building in potentially military areas,” the report said.

The BBC report said some experts have expressed doubts about the connection between “hearing the sound of an explosion” in Garmadreh and the fire. They talked about the possibility of an accidental fire or even a “fake” fire to mislead the media.

Sunday’s incident is the latest in a string of fires and explosions at military and civilian sites across Iran in recent weeks, including a blast at a suspected ballistic missile facility outside Tehran and another at a health center in which 19 people died.

Over the past few weeks fires hit a shipyard in southern Iran, an explosion at a factory south of Tehran killed two people, a petrochemical plant caught fire, and a mysterious powerful blast caused massive damage at the top-secret Natanz nuclear complex in central Iran.

The Iranian authorities called the Natanz fire an accident, but a New York Times report suggested Israel might have been behind the event.