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Iran’s supreme leader is calling for “ultimate punishment” for those responsible for the murder of a scientist linked to Tehran’s dissolved military nuclear program.
TEHRAN, Iran – Iran’s supreme leader on Saturday called for the “ultimate punishment” of those behind the murder of a scientist linked to Tehran’s dissolved military nuclear program, an assassination that the Islamic Republic has blamed on Israel.
Israel, long suspected of killing scientists a decade ago amid tensions over Tehran’s nuclear program, has yet to comment on the killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh on Friday. However, the attack bore the hallmarks of a carefully planned military-style ambush.
The assassination threatens to renew tensions between the United States and Iran in the final days of President Donald Trump’s term, just as President-elect Joe Biden suggested his administration could return to the Tehran nuclear deal with world powers from which Trump withdrew. previously. The Pentagon announced early Saturday that it had sent the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier back to the Middle East.
In a statement, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called Fakhrizadeh “the country’s prominent and distinguished nuclear and defense scientist.”
Khamenei said Iran’s first priority after the assassination was the “ultimate punishment of the perpetrators and those who ordered it.” He did not elaborate.
At a meeting of his government’s coronavirus task force early Saturday, President Hassan Rouhani blamed Israel for the murder.
Rouhani said Fakhrizadeh’s death would not stop his nuclear program, something Khamenei also said. Iran’s civilian nuclear program has continued its experiments and now enriches uranium up to 4.5%, well below weapons grade levels of 90%.
But analysts have compared Fakhrizadeh to being on a par with Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who led America’s Manhattan Project in World War II who created the atomic bomb.
“We will respond to the murder of the martyr Fakhrizadeh at the right time,” Rouhani said.
He added: “The Iranian nation is smarter than falling into the trap of the Zionists. They are thinking of creating chaos.”
Friday’s attack occurred in Absard, a village east of the capital that is a haven for the Iranian elite. Iranian state television said that an old truck with explosives hidden under a load of wood exploded near a sedan carrying Fakhrizadeh.
When Fakhrizadeh’s sedan stopped, at least five gunmen got out and attacked the car with rapid fire, the semi-official Tasnim news agency said.
Fakhrizadeh died in a hospital after doctors and paramedics were unable to revive him. Other wounded included Fakhrizadeh’s bodyguards. Photos and videos shared online showed a Nissan sedan with bullet holes in the windshield and blood pooled on the road.
Hours after the attack, the Pentagon announced that it had returned the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier to the Middle East, an unusual move since the carrier has already spent months in the region. He cited the reduction of US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq as the reason for the decision, saying “it was prudent to have additional defensive capabilities in the region to deal with any contingency.”
The attack comes just days before the 10th anniversary of the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Majid Shahriari, for which Tehran also blamed Israel. That and other targeted killings occurred at a time when the so-called Stuxnet virus, believed to be an Israeli and American creation, destroyed Iranian centrifuges.
Those attacks occurred at the height of Western fears about Iran’s nuclear program. Tehran has long insisted that its program is peaceful. However, Fakhrizadeh led Iran’s so-called AMAD program, which Israel and the West have alleged was a military operation seeking the viability of building a nuclear weapon. The International Atomic Energy Agency says the “structured program” ended in 2003.
IAEA inspectors monitor Iranian nuclear sites as part of the now crumbling nuclear deal with world powers, which saw Tehran limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.
After Trump’s withdrawal from the deal in 2018, Iran abandoned all those limits. Experts now believe that Iran has enough low-enriched uranium to make at least two nuclear weapons if it opts for the bomb. Meanwhile, an advanced centrifuge assembly plant at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility exploded in July in what Tehran now calls a sabotage attack.
Fakhrizadeh, born in 1958, had been sanctioned by the UN Security Council and the United States for his work at AMAD. Iran always described him as a university professor of physics. A member of the Revolutionary Guard, Fakhrizadeh had been seen in photographs at meetings attended by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a sign of his importance in Iran’s theocracy.
In recent years, the United States sanctions lists have appointed him as director of the Defense Research and Innovation Organization of Iran. The State Department described last year that the organization was working on “dual-use research and development activities, the aspects of which are potentially useful for nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons delivery systems.”
Iran’s mission to the UN, meanwhile, described Fakhrizadeh’s recent work as “the development of the first indigenous COVID-19 test kit” and oversaw Tehran’s efforts to make a possible coronavirus vaccine.
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Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
