Gaps in India's "Iran" bomb case

The belated occupancy chart only makes the forensic evidence claimed by the police appear even more suspicious. 

The Kazmi "disclosures" portray an alleged plot that lacked either clear delineation of responsibility for reconnaissance of the embassy or the communication one would expect between the plotters in Tehran and their one local collaborator in Delhi during the crucial months before the explosion. 

At one point in a statement attributed to Kazmi but not signed by him, he is portrayed as having returned to Delhi from a trip to Tehran in January 2011 committed to intensive research on "security arrangements and the movement of vehicles and routes travelled to Israeli Embassy."  

In discussing Irani's visit to Delhi in April 2011, however, it does not mention any debriefing of Irani by Kazmi on such reconnaissance. Instead, Irani is said to have carried out the entire reconnaissance operation, with Kazmi's help, all over again. 

When Kazmi's disclosure comes to the visit of his Tehran contacts, Seyed Ali Mehdiansadr and Reza Abolghasemi, to Delhi in May and June 2011, it makes no reference to any discussion of the reconnaissance Irani had supposedly already done. The two visitors and Kazmi are said to have repeated the same reconnaissance on the embassy yet again, even noting the licence plate numbers of embassy cars. 

An even more dramatic divergence from a coherent account of a terror plot is found in the long final Kazmi statement dated March 23 but unsigned by Kazmi. In describing Kazmi's trip to Tehran in June 2011 the statement says Kazmi's alleged key contact in the plot, Mehdiansadr, "inquired about the progress of the task assigned me."  

But the disclosure statement then says the "task" in question was not gathering detailed information on potential Israeli Embassy targets, but sending "reports on the political developments in the Gulf region, like Syria, Bahrain, Iraq, etc."  

In July and August, the same disclosure recounts, Kazmi travelled to Dubai and Syria, and when he communicated with his Tehran contacts, it was not about intelligence for a bombing plan but about his Dubai trip. 

Kazmi's disclosure asserts, in fact, that he did not report to his Iranian contacts on any intelligence gathered on the Israeli Embassy between June 2011 and January 2012, despite allegedly having been given a mobile phone specifically for that purpose. 

The questionable character of the police case that the four Iranians conspired on the Delhi bombing does not rule out the possibility that it was an Iranian government operation, but it does indicate that SC investigators could not find convincing evidence of such an Iranian role. 

This story is the second in a three-part series, "The Delhi Car Bombing: How the Police Built a False Case", in which award-winning investigative journalist Gareth Porter dissects the Delhi police accusation against an Indian journalist and four Iranians of involvement in the February 13 bombing of an Israeli embassy car. For Part One, see here.