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Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was unharmed by an
attack with a homemade explosive device on his motorcade during a visit to the
western city of Hamadan on Wednesday, a source in his office said. However, a
government statement claimed it was not an attack.

The source said Ahmadinejad’s convoy was targeted as he was
travelling from Hamadan’s airport to give a speech in a local sports arena. The
president was unhurt but others had been injured in the blast. One person was
arrested. “There was an attack this morning. Nothing happened to the president’s
car,” the source told Reuters. “Investigations continue … to find out who was
behind it.” Ahmadinejad, who has cracked down on opposition since a disputed
June 2009 presidential election, appeared on live Iranian television at the
sports stadium. He looked unperturbed and made no mention of any assault. The
populist, hardliner Ahmadinejad has accumulated enemies in conservative and
reformist circles in the Islamic Republic as well as abroad.

Al Arabiya television said an attacker had thrown a bomb at Ahmadinejad’s
convoy before being detained. Dubai-based Al Arabiya cited its own sources as
saying the bomb had hit a car carrying journalists and presidential staff.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility. The main Iranian state
television channel remained silent about the explosion, while the
English-language state news channel Press TV denied there had been any attack.
The semi-official Fars news agency, after initially reporting a man had thrown
a home-made grenade, later changed its story to say a firecracker had been set
off by a man who was excited to see the president. Ahmadinejad’s government is
facing economic pain as new foreign sanctions imposed over Iran’s disputed
nuclear energy programme bite on the world’s fifth biggest oil exporter.

Iranian leaders have responded to the pressure by accusing the
West of plotting against the Islamic Republic. Domestic opponents are accused
of being backed by foreign powers. On Monday, during a speech to a conference
of expatriate Iranians in Tehran, Ahmadinejad said he believed he was the
target of an assassination plot by Israel. “The stupid Zionists have hired
mercenaries to assassinate me,” he said. But one opposition activist said it
was a very different thing for the president to talk of attacks and for an
attack to actually take place. “It is obviously a reflection of the fact that
all is not well in Iran and control is not total, contrary to conventional
wisdom,” said Mehrdad Khonsari, a London-based Iranian opposition activist.

Provocative speeches

One of Ahmadinejad’s trademarks has been constant travel around
his vast country to deliver provocative speeches before outwardly adoring
crowds who shout “death” to Iran’s foes. The oil market initially reacted
calmly to reports of the attempted attack. Iran gets just under half of its
revenue from oil and gas and would benefit from any rise in prices.

“I expect that any backlash there might be from Ahmadinejad will
be far more important to the oil market than the initial attack itself,” said
Paul Harris, head of natural resources risk management at Bank of Ireland. “You
would expect the oil market to react if there is any attempt to link the attack
to the current tensions with the West and the ramping up of sanctions.”

Baqer Moin, a London-based Iran expert, said Hamadan was a
stable area without any notable ethnic or local tension. “Let’s wait and see
who they accuse, an internal or an external enemy,” Moin said. Several armed
groups opposed to the government are active in Iran, mostly ethnic Kurds in the
northwest, Baluch in the southeast and Arabs in the southwest. The banned
Mujahideen Khalq, listed by the United States as a terrorist group, carried out
many anti-government attacks after the 1979 Islamic revolution. It was blamed
for two 1981 bombings that killed dozens of senior officials in Tehran,
including the president and prime minister.

But Shahin Gobadi, French-based spokesman for the Mujahideen,
now part of an opposition coalition known as the National Council of Resistance
of Iran, denied involvement. Asked if his group was behind the attack, he said:
“Absolutely not, absolutely not. It has nothing to do with us. I don’t know
what happened but it has nothing to do with us.” Ahmadinejad recently sought to
isolate rival political factions by declaring that “the regime has only one
party, which is the velayat” – a reference to Shi’ite Islam’s hidden Imam, for
now represented by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Just as combative towards external pressure, the president has derided
sanctions over Iran’s nuclear programme as “pathetic” and vowed to pursue what
Iran says is a quest for nuclear energy, not weapons as the West believes. On
Monday, Ahmadinejad called on U.S. President Barack Obama to face him in a
televised one-on-one debate to see who has the best solutions for the world’s
problems.

Ahmadinejad, backed by Khamenei and
the elite Revolutionary Guards, crushed street protests that greeted his
disputed re-election in June 2009, although he has yet to silence losing
reformist candidates Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi. The president, first
elected in 2005, also seems bent on displacing an older layer of conservative
leaders and clerics whose influence dates back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution.