Israeli diplomats were targeted by bomb attacks in Delhi and Tbilisi on Monday, officials said, with two people injured in the Indian capital when an embassy car exploded in a ball of fire. The car, which blew up in a high security area of central Delhi, a short distance from the Israeli embassy and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s official residence, was badly burnt. Police in the Georgian capital defused an explosive device found in the car of an Israeli embassy employee, the ex-Soviet state’s Interior Ministry said. Ravi Singh, a petrol pump attendant who was standing on the other side of the road from the Delhi blast, said: “There was a huge explosion. There was a woman and a driver in the car which was burning and the women was dragged out.”
Israeli embassy spokesman in New Delhi David Goldfarb said that one of the injured occupants of the car was an Israeli diplomat but declined to comment further. An Israeli security official said the diplomat was a woman. Indian police cordoned off the area surrounding the burnt-out station wagon and investigators were at the site. “We are examining the materials at the site and we are yet to get the experts’ report so we still cannot say how the blast occurred,” New Delhi police spokesman Rajan Bhagat told AFP.
He said there were no details about the condition of the two injured people but television reports said that one was in a critical condition. A photograph on NDTV television showed flames shooting out of the vehicle when the explosion occurred. “There was an explosion in an Israeli diplomat’s car but we don’t know how it happened,” Goldfarb said. “We are in constant contact with the local authorities.” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told AFP in Jerusalem that Israeli authorities were investigating the blast in New Delhi as well as the incident Tbilisi.
