Better not try that in our Georgia

Thomas Fuller has an article in The New York Times about the latest bombings:

Bombs discovered in a house in Bangkok were similar to devices used earlier this week against Israeli diplomats in India and Georgia, Israel’s ambassador to Thailand said. “It’s almost the same system that was used in Delhi and in Tblisi, which leads us to think that they are connected,” Ambassador Itzhak Shoham said in a telephone interview.
Iranian officials immediately rejected the accusation, and a senior official for the Thai police said it was too early to draw any links to an explosion and a series of grenade blasts.
After the blasts, two men who Thai police officials said carried Iranian passports were captured. The officials also said two other suspects, whom they believed to be Iranians, were being sought, and that one of them had fled to neighboring Malaysia.
Israeli authorities believe that the discovery of explosives in Bangkok fits into a pattern of Iranian-backed attacks on Israeli targets. Shoham said he believed Bangkok had been chosen because it was a “soft target. It’s easy to come in and out, to rent a house,” he said. “Nobody pays attention to people coming and going.” Shoham said the devices seized in Bangkok used the same type of explosive as those in New Delhi and Tblisi, the Georgian capital, and were similarly outfitted with magnets that would allow them to be attached to metal objects. The devices used in the New Delhi attack and discovered on the car of an Israeli Embassy staff member in Tbilisi were attached to vehicles using magnets.
A senior Thai police official said he was not ready to draw conclusions. “We haven’t concluded yet that we have the same magnets used in the incidents in India or Georgia,” Lieutenant General Winai Thongsong, the head of the Bangkok Metropolitan Police, said in a telephone interview. “That’s only the conclusion from Israeli authorities.” General Winai said Thai police had not yet seen the magnets used in the other incidents. The devices seized in Thailand contained eight magnets, each the size of a penny, he said.
Wichean Potephosree, the head of Thailand’s national security council, said on Wednesday that the explosives found in Bangkok were designed to “target individuals. The destructive power did not reach the level of being able to target groups of people or big buildings,” Wichean said at a media briefing.
Witnesses said three men (photo), who appeared to be foreigners, fled a house in the Sukhumvit neighborhood of Bangkok after an explosion destroyed the house’s roof. One escaped and another was detained at the city’s main international airport. Witnesses and police officials said the third man, bleeding and apparently disoriented, lobbed two explosive devices as he left the house, one at a taxi and later another at approaching police officers. The second blast severed the man’s legs and wounded several Thais, they said. A fourth suspect, a woman, was not at the house at the time of the explosion, but is being sought because she rented the house and was occasionally seen there, the police said.
The reported nationalities of the two captured suspects raised suspicions that the suspects were part of what Israel has called a terrorist campaign by Iran and the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah aimed at Israeli targets, an accusation denied by Iran and Hezbollah.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, reiterated Tehran’s rejection of the allegations, calling them “baseless” and accusing Israel of trying to damage its relations with Thailand, The Associated Press reported.
Some terrorism experts urged caution about what they called a rush to judgment immediately after the explosions in Bangkok. Will Hartley, the editor of Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center in London, said in an email that “The attacks in India, Georgia, and now Thailand have all been highly amateurish, and lack the sophistication that would normally be expected from an operation” by either Hezbollah or Iran’s external operations wing, the Quds Force.
Israeli officials said that Israeli forensic teams were in New Delhi and Tbilisi, helping the local authorities investigate the bombings, a standard practice whenever Israelis are the targets of attacks abroad.
For the past month, Israeli and Thai security forces had been cooperating on a separate case of a possible planned terrorist attack. The Thai authorities said Israeli intelligence agents had warned that a group of people who appeared to be from Hezbollah were planning to strike tourist sites. Shortly after that warning, a Lebanese man was arrested at Bangkok’s main airport as he tried to leave the country.

Rico says that whoever is responsible for this better be looking over their shoulders; the Israelis have no sense of humor about this. Of course, neither do guys from the Georgia in the American South...