Israeli embassy staff were targeted by car bomb attacks in Delhi and Tbilisi on today, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayhu pointing the finger of blame at Iran.
An embassy car exploded in a ball of fire in New Delhi, wounding two people, while Georgian police were able to defuse the Tbilisi device before it went off. Netanhayu said the Islamic republic was responsible for both incidents.
"Iran is behind these attacks. It is the biggest exporter of terror in the world," Netanyahu told members of his rightwing Likud party.
An Israeli woman diplomat and another person, believed to be her male driver, were hurt when the car blew up in a high-security area of central Delhi.
"We heard a huge explosion and then me and my workers ran to the site where we found the car on fire," petrol pump supervisor Ravi Singh told reporters.
"I think there was a woman and a driver in the car and I think (other) people pulled her out. And then the fire tenders (trucks) arrived at the site," he said.
Indian police said they were hunting for a man on a motorbike suspected of attaching a device to the car shortly before it exploded.
The explosion, which left the Israeli station wagon a charred shell and blew out the rear door, occurred a short distance from the Jewish state's embassy and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's official residence.
Police in the Georgian capital thwarted another attack when they disabled an explosive device found in the car of an Israeli embassy employee, the ex-Soviet state's interior ministry said.
There was no claim of responsibility for the attack in New Delhi or the attempted car bombing in Tblisi.
But the strikes fell between anniversaries of the deaths of two top Hezbollah militants that spark annual travel warnings from the Israel and triggered suspicion they could be the work of the guerrilla movement, which has close ties to Iran.
Israeli embassy spokesman in New Delhi David Goldfarb confirmed that one of the injured occupants of the car was an Israeli diplomat but declined to comment further.
"We don't know how it (the explosion) happened, Goldfarb said.
Joji Philip Thomas, another witness, tweeted that the woman spoke to rescuers after the blast.
Indian police cordoned off the area surrounding the car and investigators were at the site.
"We are examining the materials at the site and we are yet to get the experts' report so we still cannot say how the blast occurred," New Delhi police spokesman Rajan Bhagat told AFP.
Bhagat said there were no details about the condition of the two injured people but television reports said that one was in a critical condition.
A photograph on NDTV television showed flames shooting out of the vehicle when the explosion occurred.
The Indian government, meanwhile, ordered tightening of security at diplomatic missions, especially of Israel, the United States and other Western countries, the Press Trust of India reported.
Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told AFP that Israel was "cooperating with the local law enforcement agencies" in New Delhi and Tbilisi.
A Jewish centre run by the the ultra-Orthodox Lubavitch movement was among the targets in the November 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, which India blames on the Pakistani-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, in which 10 gunmen killed at least 188 people.
The last militant strike in New Delhi was last September when a bomb outside the High Court killed 14 people -- the latest in a series of blasts that has shaken public confidence in the Indian government's counter-terror capabilities.