Indian police arrest man with Iran link over Israel attack

An Indian journalist who worked for an Iranian news agency has been arrested in connection with last month's Israeli embassy car bomb blast, police and court officials said on Wednesday, the first arrest linked to the attack.
The February 13 blast, which wounded an Israeli defence attache's wife, her driver and two others, coincided with a foiled attack on Israeli diplomatic staff in Tbilisi, Georgia, and Israel has said both were engineered by the Quds Force, a covert arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps.
The Indian journalist, Mohammed Kazmi, was an employee of India's state television channel and also freelanced for Iran's state funded Islamic Republic News Agency, his lawyer and members of his family said. It was not immediately clear if he still worked for the agency.
Kazmi was arrested in New Delhi on Tuesday and was presented in court, face covered, on Wednesday. He was put in police custody for 20 days for further investigations into the attack. Kazmi was not directly involved in the attack itself, in which a motorcyclist attached a magnetic bomb to the car in moving traffic and set off the device, police spokesman Rajan Bhagat said.
The main suspect was a foreigner, possibly an Iranian, a senior police source who did not want to be named told reporters. "What we have learnt from the interrogation is that this man (Kazmi) had been in touch with the main accused," said the source. "We have also found out that the main accused had visited Kazmi's residence."
Last month, Israel accused arch-enemies Iran and its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, of being behind the twin bomb attacks that targeted Israeli embassy staff in India and Georgia. They were followed a day later by three explosions in Bangkok, Thailand, one of which seriously wounded an Iranian man. Israel said that was also part of an attempted terrorist attack by Iran. Tehran denied involvement in the attacks, which amplified tensions between two countries already at loggerheads over Iran's nuclear programme, and accused Israel of carrying out the attacks itself.