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Ali Shamkhani, secretary of the National Security Council, made the remarks at Mohsen Fakhrizadeh’s funeral.
Israel, long suspected of being behind a program to assassinate Iranian investigators working in the military, declined to comment after the attack.
Fakhrizadeh led Iran’s AMAD program, which Israel and several Western countries say is a military program aimed at obtaining atomic weapons.
Shamkhani’s remarks drastically change the initial version of Fakhrizadeh’s murder on Friday. Authorities later claimed that a truck had exploded and that armed men had shot the investigator and killed him. State television even aired an interview the night of the attack in which a man claimed to have seen armed people open fire. The first reports from Iranian news agencies even claimed that the scientist’s guards fired at the attackers.
English state television Press TV reported that a weapon recovered from the attack site bears “the logo and specifications of the Israeli military industry.” Arabic-language state television Al-Alam reported that the weapons used were “controlled by satellite,” a statement also made Sunday by the semi-official Fars news agency. None of these outlets presented evidence to support the accusations.
“Unfortunately, the operation was very complicated and was carried out with electronic devices,” said Shamkhani. “No one was present” at the scene of the attack.
Satellite-controlled weaponry is nothing new. Long-range armed drones rely on satellite connections to be remotely controlled by their pilots. There are also larger remotely controlled weapons, but generally the operator is connected via a physical connection to reduce delays in sending commands.
Although technically feasible, it is unclear if such a system has ever been used, says Jeremy Binnie, Jane’s Defense Weekly editor for the Middle East.
“Can you configure a weapon with a camera equipped with an (information) stream that uses satellite communication with the operator? I don’t see why that’s not possible, “says Binnie.
The question also arises whether the truck that exploded during the attack was detonated to destroy a satellite-controlled machine gun that was hidden in it. It would also have taken people on the ground to install the weapon.
“Soleimani of science”
Not much is known about the murdered investigator, but one thing is certain: he was important, AFP notes.
Enough to meet with Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in January 2019, as official photos released after his death show.
Important enough to have an armored vehicle, to benefit from an armed escort and for the chief of staff of the armed forces, Major General Mohammad Bagheri, to promise “terrible revenge.”
After his death, Defense Minister Amir Hatami introduced him as Deputy Minister and Head of the Defense Research and Innovation Division (Sepand, in Persian).
The US press described him as “the number one target of Mossad,” the Israeli intelligence agency, and “the mastermind of the Iranian nuclear program.”
“He knew that he was in danger of being killed multiple times and that he survived,” General Hatami said.
Before Netanyahu claimed that Fakhrizadeh was the father of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh appeared in a December 2015 document at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
According to the UN agency, he has led “activities in support of a possible military dimension” of the Iranian nuclear program launched “in the late 1980s” since the early “early 2000s” before these activities were they regrouped under his leadership in a project called AMAD, until its abandonment “at the end of 2003”.
In March 2007, Fakhrizadeh came under sanctions from the UN Security Council.
According to Iranian Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization (IAEA), Fakhrizadeh earned a doctorate in nuclear physics and engineering and worked on his dissertation with Fereydoun Abbassi Davani, the former IAEA chief who was targeted by a assassination attempt. in 2010.
Evoking in the state press the memory of a “close friend” and a “close professional collaboration of 34 years”, the latter claimed that he fought alongside Fakhrizadeh during the war between Iraq and Iran (1980-1988).
“He worked in all areas that support the country’s nuclear activities”, especially in “uranium enrichment”, continued Abbassi Davani, he was a “competent manager and a prestigious scientist and can be elevated to the same rank as the martyr Soleimani (General Qassem Soleimani removed in January by Washington) in science and technology. ”
