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DUBAI (Reuters) – Iran’s supreme leader vowed on Saturday to retaliate for the assassination of the Islamic Republic’s top nuclear scientist, increasing the threat of a new confrontation with the West and Israel in the remaining weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency. .
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed to continue the work of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who the Western and Israeli governments believe was the architect of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Friday’s assassination, which Iran’s president quickly blamed on Israel, could complicate any effort by President-elect Joe Biden to reignite a détente with Tehran that was forged when he was in the Barack Obama administration.
Trump pulled Washington out of the 2015 international nuclear pact agreed between Tehran and the major powers. Khamenei, who is Iran’s highest authority and who says the country has never sought nuclear weapons, said on Twitter that Iranian officials must take on the task of “pursuing this crime and punishing its perpetrators and those who commanded it.”
Fakhrizadeh, who had little public profile in Iran but whom Israel named as a major player in what it says is Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, died Friday when he was ambushed near Tehran and his car was doused with bullets. He was rushed to the hospital where he died.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said in a televised meeting on Saturday that Iran would respond “at the right time.”
“Once again, the evil hands of Global Arrogance and the Zionist mercenaries were stained with the blood of an Iranian son,” he said, using terms officials use to refer to Israel.
Israeli Cabinet Minister Tzachi Hanegbi, a confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said he did not know who carried out the assassination. “I have no idea who did it. It’s not that my lips are sealed because I’m responsible, I just have no idea,” she told N12’s Meet the Press.
CHALLENGE FOR BIDEN
Israel Army Radio said that some Israeli embassies had been put on high alert following Iranian threats of retaliation, although there were no reports of concrete threats. The radio’s military affairs correspondent said the army was on routine footing.
Netanyahu’s office declined to comment on Fakhrizadeh’s assassination and a spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry said the ministry did not comment on security in regards to missions abroad.
The White House, the Pentagon, the US State Department and the CIA have also declined to comment on the assassination, as has Biden’s transition team. Biden will take office on January 20.
“Whether Iran is tempted to retaliate or if it restrains, it will make it difficult for Biden to return to the nuclear deal,” wrote Amos Yadlin, former Israeli military intelligence chief and director of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, on Twitter.
Under the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran agreed to curb its nuclear work in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Once Trump withdrew in 2018, US sanctions intensified, reducing Iran’s vital oil exports and paralyzing the economy. Meanwhile, Tehran accelerated its nuclear work.
Germany, part of the nuclear pact, and the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, called for moderation everywhere.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted that it was “shameful that some refuse to oppose terrorism and hide behind calls for restraint.”
ACCELERATION OF NUCLEAR WORK
A senior official told Reuters: “Iran will definitely retaliate. When and how depends on our national interests. It could happen in the next few days or weeks, but it will happen.”
He pointed to Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes in January on an Iraqi base where US forces were stationed, days after a US drone strike in Baghdad killed senior Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani. No US troops were killed in the action.
“Fakhrizadeh’s martyrdom will accelerate our nuclear work,” said Fereydoon Abbasi, former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, who survived an assassination attempt in 2010.
At least four scientists were killed between 2010 and 2012 in what Tehran said was an assassination program designed to sabotage its nuclear power program. Iran has always denied seeking nuclear weapons, saying its goals are only peaceful.
Fakhrizadeh was thought to have spearheaded what the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and US intelligence services believe to be Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
He was the only Iranian scientist mentioned in the IAEA’s 2015 “final assessment” of open questions on Iran’s nuclear program. He said he oversaw activities “in support of a possible military dimension to (Iran’s) nuclear program.”
Fakhrizadeh was also a central figure in a presentation by the Israeli prime minister in 2018 accusing Iran of continuing to seek nuclear weapons. “Remember that name, Fakhrizadeh,” Netanyahu said at the time.
US intelligence services and the IAEA believe that Iran halted its coordinated weapons program in 2003. The IAEA has said it had no credible indications of activities in Iran relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device after 2009.
The United States deployed the US aircraft carrier Nimitz with accompanying ships to the Gulf on Wednesday, shortly before the killing, but a spokeswoman for the US Navy said the deployment was not related to any specific threat.
(Additional reporting by Francois Murphy in Vienna and Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem; written by Parisa Hafezi; edited by Frances Kerry and Edmund Blair)
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