‘Iran-backed’ car-bomb plot to attack US embassy thwarted

The United States foiled a suspected Iranian-backed plot to attack its embassy staff and their families in Azerbaijan this year.

The plan was to use a combination of car bombs and sniper rifles equipped with silencers, and bore the hallmarks of Iran or ally Hezbollah.

It appeared to have been part of a wider campaign in which alleged Iranian hit squads focused on Israeli diplomats in neighbouring Georgia, as well as India and Thailand.

Although Iran was never conclusively implicated by investigators, all the clues led back to Tehran’s powerful intelligence agencies.

The Azerbaijani head of the crime gang recruited to smuggle the weapons and operatives in from Tehran said it was payback for the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists – a charge rejected by Iranian diplomats in the Azerbaijan capital, Baku, the Washington Post reported.

The threat receded when Azerbaijani authorities rounded up two dozen people at the start of the year, and a suspected broader campaign against diplomats worldwide may have been frozen in the northern spring as the West engaged in a new round of talks with Tehran over the future of its nuclear programme.

To avoid disrupting the talks, the US has refrained from directly accusing Iran of hatching the plot.

However, officials said there was a possibility that Iran and Hezbollah had worked together.

‘‘There appears to have been a deliberate attempt to calm things down ahead of the talks,’’ a Western diplomat told the Post. ‘‘What happens if the talks fail, that’s anyone’s guess.’’

Azerbaijan has emerged as a new front in the cold war between Iran and the West, to which the small state increasingly looks for protection.

US reports this year said Azerbaijan could be a launch pad for a potential Israeli air strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Israeli agents admitted they had increased their presence in Baku after Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, uncovered an alleged Hezbollah plot to attack their embassy following the killing of the Lebanese militia’s strategic mastermind, Imad Mughniyah, in Damascus in 2008.

Iran has accused Israel and the US of being behind the assassination of four nuclear scientists. Its nuclear centrifuges were sabotaged by the Stuxnet virus, a cyber weapon.