Beyond Bellicosity

"It was strange that there were so many security people around but none of them seemed to be focused on actually helping the wounded people, and [I] couldn't believe that I of all people was the one taking care of this burning woman and stopping her from burning up", commented an Israeli eyewitness as he described tamping down flames on a woman on fire from a bus explosion in Burgas, Bulgaria.

"We heard a boom and next thing we saw were body parts scattered on the ground, there were wounded people also on the ground.  I could see a burned hole in the side of the bus.  We were just getting on the bus when suddenly someone came near the bus' front door and exploded."

The Bulgarian tour operator along with six Israelis on holiday in the Black Sea resort area were killed in the blast that turned into a fireball outside the airport in the city of Burgas following an El Al flight from Israel.  Dozens of people were injured and taken to hospital with burns and shrapnel wounds. The Bulgarian Foreign Ministry announced that the country's president, foreign minister and interior minister rushed to the scene of the disaster.

The explosion was named as a terrorist attack.  "All signs point to Iran.  Over the last few months we have seen Iran's attempts to attack Israelis in Thailand, India, Georgia, Kenya, Cyprus and other countries", said President Netanyahu afterward.  He spoke of a pattern of "global Iranian terror onslaught", that "Israel will react firmly to [it]."

He pointed out, as did other Israeli officials, that this attack occurred eighteen years to the day of a bombing in Buenos Aires killing 85 people at a Jewish centre in Argentina, wounding hundreds of others.  Argentine prosecutors had laid the blame squarely at Iran's feet of clay.  Since the initial claims, Tel Aviv has suggested that it might have been Iran's proxy militia Hezbollah that carried out the attack, although Hezbollah denies it.

A slow, methodical investigation is certain to take place so that Israeli intelligence will unerringly unravel who it was that authorized the attack on civilian Israelis in Bulgaria, and the individuals who took part in the atrocity.  Israel has a well-deserved reputation of doggedly tracking down such perpetrators and bringing them to a justice of her own devising.

Bulgaria had been warned by Israeli intelligence previously that attacks were pending.