DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) – An Iranian scientist named by the West as the leader of the Islamic Republic’s disbanded military nuclear program was killed Friday in an attack on the seam of Tehran, officials said.
Iran’s foreign minister has accused the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh of giving “serious indications” of Israel’s role, but did not elaborate. Israel, a longtime suspect in the killing of several Iranian nuclear scientists a decade ago, immediately declined to comment. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once told people to “remember that name” when talking about Fakhrizadeh.
Iran and the U.S. Nearly a year after rising to the brink of war, when a top Iranian general was assassinated in Baghdad by an American drone strike, the dangers of this assassination added further tension to the media.. If elected, Biden is set to be inaugurated in January and his efforts to return to the United States are likely to be aimed at ensuring that Iran does not have enough uranium to build a nuclear weapon.
The deal, which saw Iran limit its uranium enrichment in exchange for lifting economic sanctions, has been fully resolved since President Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018.
Trump himself retweeted a post by Israeli journalist Yossi Melman about the assassination of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service expert. Melman’s tweet called the killing a “major psychological and professional blow to Iran.”
Details of the killings were leaked hours after the attack, which took place in Absard, east of the capital, a secluded part of Iran’s elite. Iranian state television said an old truck with explosives hidden under a wooden load blew up a sedan carrying Fakhrizadeh.
As Fakhrizadeh’s sedan went off, at least five gunmen emerged and set the car on fire, the Centennial Tasnim news agency said.
Fakhrizadeh died at the hospital after doctors and paramedics failed to resuscitate him. Others injured included Fakhrizadeh’s bodyguards. The shared photos and video showed a Nissan sedan with bullet holes in the windshield and a pool of blood on the road.
While no one has claimed responsibility for the attack, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif pointed a finger at Israel and called the killing “state terrorism.”
“Terrorists killed a well-known Iranian scientist today. This cowardice – with serious indications of Israel’s role – shows the perpetrators fighting desperately, “Zarif wrote on Twitter.
Hussein Daheg, Iran’s supreme leader and presidential candidate in the 2021 election, also blamed Israel – and issued a warning.
“In the last days of his gambling political life, the Zionists want to increase and increase the pressure on Iran to wage a full-blown war,” Dehkhan wrote, referring to the last days in Trump’s office. “We will come down like lightning on the killers of this victim martyr and we will apologize to them for their actions!”
The attack comes just days before the 10-year anniversary of the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Majid Shahriri, whom Tehran also blamed on Israel. That and other targeted killings occurred at a time when the so-called Stuxnet virus, believed to be Israeli and American-made, was destroying Iranian centrifuges.
The area around Absard, which overlooks the country’s highest peak, Mount Damavand, is full of vacation villas. Roads, as part of the Iranian weekend on Friday, were tougher than usual due to a lockdown on the coronavirus epidemic, giving its attackers a chance to strike with fewer people around.
Fakhrizadeh led Iran’s so-called Amad program, which Israel and the West have accused of taking military action in view of the possibility of developing a nuclear weapon. Tehran has long maintained that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes only.
The International Atomic Energy Agency says Iran undertook activities related to the development of a nuclear explosive device in a “structured program” by the end of 2003. It was the AMAD program, which included carefully working on high-explosives required to detonate.
The IAEA said Iran also “did computer modeling of a nuclear explosive device” before 2005 and between 2005 and 2009. The agency said, however, that those calculations were “incomplete and fragmented.”
IAEA observers are now monitoring Iran’s nuclear sites as part of an unresolved nuclear deal with world powers. Experts believe that Iran has less enriched uranium than enough to make at least two nuclear weapons if it chooses to pursue a bomb. Meanwhile, a state-of-the-art centrifuge assembly plant at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility exploded in July, prompting Tehran to call it a sabotage attack..
Born in 1958, Fakhrizadeh has been a member of the UN Security Council and the U.S.A. Approved for his work on AMAD. Iran has always described him as a professor of physics at the university. Fakhrizadeh, a member of the Revolutionary Guards, was seen in pictures by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, at meetings signaling his power.
In recent years, U.S. The list of sanctions lists it as Iran’s Defer Organization for Defensive Innovation and Research. The State Department last year described the organization as “working on dual-use research and development activities, aspects of which are potentially useful for nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons distribution systems.”
In 2018, Netanyahu gave a presentation in which he unveiled what Iran described as material stolen from the nuclear archives by Israel..
Netanyahu alleged, “The main part of the plan was to create new institutions to keep the work going.” Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the head of project income, put it this way. Remember that name, Fakhrizadeh. ”
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Associated Press writers Amir Wahadat and Mohammad Nasiri in Tehran, Iran, and Deb Richman in Washington, Washington, contributed to the report.
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