Iranian scientist linked to military nuclear program ‘assassinated’

An Iranian scientist named by the West as the leader of the Islamic Republic’s dissolved military nuclear program was killed on Friday (local time) in an ambush outside Tehran, authorities said.

Iran’s foreign minister claimed that the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh had “serious indications” of an Israeli role, but did not elaborate.

Israel, suspected of killing several Iranian nuclear scientists a decade ago, immediately declined to comment. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once told the public to “remember that name” when talking about Fakhrizadeh.

The carnage risks further escalating tensions in the Middle East, nearly a year after Iran and the United States were on the brink of war when a US drone strike killed a top Iranian general in Baghdad. It comes just as President-elect Joe Biden is about to be inaugurated in January and will likely complicate his efforts to return the United States to a pact aimed at ensuring that Iran does not have enough highly enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon.

That deal, which saw Iran limit its uranium enrichment in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions, completely fell apart after President Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018.

Trump himself retweeted a post by Israeli journalist Yossi Melman, an expert with the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, about the assassination. Melman’s tweet called the murder a “major psychological and professional blow to Iran.”

Details about the killing remained scant in the hours after the attack, which 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 video shared online showed a Nissan sedan with bullet holes in the windshield and blood pooled on the road.

While no one claimed responsibility for the attack, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif pointed the finger at Israel and called the killing an act of “state terror”.

“Terrorists murdered an eminent Iranian scientist today. This cowardice, with serious hints of Israel’s role, shows a desperate warmongering of the perpetrators,” Zarif wrote on Twitter.

Hossein Dehghan, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader and a presidential candidate in the 2021 Iran elections, also blamed Israel and issued a warning.

“In the final days of their ally’s political life in the game, the Zionists seek to intensify and increase pressure on Iran to wage a full-blown war,” Dehghan wrote, appearing to refer to Trump’s final days in office. .

“We will descend like lightning on the murderers of this oppressed martyr and make them repent of their actions!”

Hours after the attack, the Pentagon announced that it had already 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.

The area around Absard, which has a view of Mount Damavand, the highest peak in the country, is full of holiday villas. Roads on Friday, part of the Iranian weekend, were emptier than normal due to a blockade from the coronavirus pandemic, offering its attackers the opportunity to strike with fewer people around.

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. Tehran has long maintained that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes only.

The International Atomic Energy Agency says Iran “carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device” in a “structured program” until the end of 2003. That was the AMAD program, which included work on high explosives. carefully timed power required to detonate an implosion-type nuclear bomb.

Iran also “performed computer modeling of a nuclear explosive device” before 2005 and between 2005 and 2009, the IAEA has said. The agency said, however, those calculations were “incomplete and fragmented.”

IAEA inspectors now monitor Iranian nuclear sites as part of the now-crumbling nuclear deal with world powers. Experts believe Iran has enough low-enriched uranium to make at least two nuclear weapons if it chooses to pursue 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 pictures at meetings attended by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a sign of his power.

In recent years, the United States sanctions lists appoint him as director of the Defense Research and Innovation Organization of Iran. The State Department described last year that the organization works on “dual-use research and development activities, the aspects of which are potentially useful for nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons delivery systems.”

Meanwhile, Iran’s mission to the UN 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.

In 2018, Netanyahu made a presentation in which he revealed what he described as material stolen by Israel from an Iranian nuclear archive.

“A key part of the plan was to form new organizations to continue the work,” Netanyahu claimed.

“This is how Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, director of the AMAD Project, put it. Remember that name, Fakhrizadeh.”