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TEHRAN: Iran said that one of its most prominent nuclear scientists was killed on Friday (November 27) in an attack on his car outside Tehran that accused his arch enemy Israel of being behind.
Scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was “seriously injured” when the assailants attacked his car before participating in a shootout with his security team, Iran’s Defense Ministry said in a statement.
He added that Fakhrizadeh, who headed the ministry’s research and innovation organization, was later “martyred” after doctors failed to revive him.
Fakhrizadeh, once described by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the father of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, was traveling in a car near the town of Absard in Damavand county in eastern Tehran province.
A state television report on the assassination described him as “one of the nuclear scientists of our country” and said that Israel “had an old and deep enmity towards him.”
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said there were “serious indications of an Israeli role” in the scientist’s murder.
“Terrorists assassinated an eminent Iranian scientist today,” Zarif wrote on Twitter.
“This cowardice, with serious indications of Israel’s role, shows a desperate warmongering of the perpetrators,” he added.
Scene of the attack on Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in Tehran. (Photo: AP)
He also asked the international community to “put an end to its shameful double standards and condemn this act of state terror.”
Fakhrizadeh’s assassination comes less than two months before Joe Biden takes office as president of the United States.
Biden has promised a return to diplomacy with Iran after four aggressive years under current US President Donald Trump, who withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and began reimposing crippling sanctions.
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Trump said at the time that the agreement formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) did not offer sufficient guarantees to prevent Tehran from acquiring an atomic bomb.
Iran has always denied that it wants such a weapon.
Trump retweeted reports of Fakhrizadeh’s assassination on Friday, without commenting himself.
The killing comes a day after Thailand said it had returned three Iranians jailed for a botched 2012 bomb plot in Bangkok that Israel had linked to a series of attacks on its diplomats around the world.
Iran said the three were “a businessman and two other” Iranians detained abroad on the basis of “false accusations”, without giving further information.
Scene of the attack on Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in Tehran. (Photo: AP)
The Fakhrizadeh assassination is the latest in a series of killings of nuclear scientists in Iran in recent years that the Islamic republic has blamed Israel for carrying out.
The New York Times reported in early November that Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command was secretly shot and killed in Tehran by two Israeli agents on a motorcycle at the behest of Washington.
The high-ranking leader, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Masri, was assassinated in August along with his daughter, Miriam, the widow of Osama bin Laden’s son Hamza, the Times said, citing intelligence sources. .
Iran said the report was based on “fabricated information” and reaffirmed its denial of the presence of any of the group’s members in the Islamic republic.
The state news agency IRNA and Iran’s Mehr at the time reported on a similar incident and identified the victims as Habib Dawoud, a 58-year-old Lebanese history teacher, and his 27-year-old daughter Maryam, without giving further details.
