Israeli diplomat’s wife may have spotted Delhi bomber

The Israeli diplomat’s wife who survived the car bomb blast in New Delhi on Monday evidently spotted the terrorist barely moments before the attack, her brother has told the Israeli media. Tal Yehoshua Koren, the wife of the Israeli defence attaché in India, may have managed to get out of the car after she saw the terrorist attach the “sticky bomb”, according to her brother Ido Koren. Ido Koren told Ynetnews of Israel : “According to information we received, a terrorist arrived on a motorcycle and attached something to the vehicle. She grasped the situation, showed resourcefulness, managed to get out of the car and evacuated herself to the hospital despite her injury. Everything happened within seconds.”[caption id=“attachment_212959” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The blast hit Israeli embassy vehicle. PTI”] [/caption] Koren added that while the motorcyclist bomber may have managed to get away, his sister’s “amazing level-headedness” meant that she had survived the bomb blast. The brother’s account is somewhat at variance from eyewitness accounts of the incident . Journalist Joji Philip Thomas, who was bore eyewitness to the blast, tweeted in real time: “The car in front me just exploded – a foreigner inside got flung to the other side of d road.” In subsequent posts, he uploaded pictures of the burning car, and of people rushing to help the injured diplomat’s wife. “Here is a shot of people helping the Israeli lady – see how far she was flung,” he noted. Thomas confirmed that the woman, though “badly injured, was speaking just after the blast”, and that she insisted that she be taken to the embassy and not to the hospital. She was then taken in an autorickshaw to the embassy – from where she was taken to the hospital. Ido Koren was further reported as saying that Yehoshua-Koren suffered shrapnel wounds to her back, and that the fragments were removed from her body. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed Iran and the Shia militant group Hizbollah for the attack in New Delhi and for another attempted bombing in the Georgian capital that was averted. Iran has denied the charge. But Israeli media reports suggest that although the country’s leaders have made clear that they will not stand by in the event of attacks, there is no immediate risk of an attack by Israel on Iran as reprisal for the New Delhi bomb attack. Israeli analysts reason that the fact that the attacks in New Delhi and Tbilisi were not carried out against high-profile targets may have been deliberate. Israel has made clear on several occasions that it may launch a major strike on Lebanon in retaliation against a Hezbollah attack on an Israeli target abroad. To them, it signals that Iran, which they believe is behind the attacks, does not wish to provoke a conflict with Israel, which would have been inevitable if the scale of the attack had been bigger. In 2008, for instance, Israeli officials claimed to have busted an Iranian plot to blow up the embassy building in Baku in the Central Asian republic of Azerbaijan. The bombing in New Delhi was timed for the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Hezbollah’s military chief Imad Mugniyah, which Iran has blamed on the Israeli secret service Mossad. Mugniyah was killed when an explosive was planted in the headrest of the driver’s seat of his jeep. Israel has denied it was responsible. Israeli analysts suggest that the it was unlikely that the New Delhi attack was actually carried out by the Hezbollah special unit or by Iran’s special forces. Instead, they believe, locals belonging to a collaborator network may have set off the bomb.