Top Iranian nuclear scientist assassinated outside Tehran, apparently by Israel

A major figure in Iran’s nuclear program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed Friday, his vehicle ambushed on a road outside the Iranian capital. The attack occurred during daylight hours, and it was clearly carried out by highly skilled and trained people.

WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan 24) – A major figure in Iran’s nuclear program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed Friday, his vehicle ambushed on a road outside the Iranian capital. The attack occurred during daylight hours, and it was clearly carried out by highly skilled and trained people.

The Iranian government blamed Israel, which, most recently, was involved in the assassination of another individual in Iran: Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, a member of al Qaida, who had been indicted for his role in the near-simultaneous bombings of two US embassies in Africa.

An Egyptian, known by his nom de guerre, Abu Muhammed al-Masri, Abdullah was shot dead in a Tehran alley on August 7—the 22nd anniversary of the attack.

Friday’s assault on Fakhrizadeh began with the explosion of a bomb, concealed in an old truck, forcing his vehicle to stop on a road east of Tehran, near Absard, a rural retreat used by the Iranian elite.

At least five gunmen then began shooting at the car, according to the Tasnim news agency, which has close ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC.)

In a tweet, Iran’s Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, denounced the killing "as an act of state terror,” with “serious indications of [an] Israeli role.”

The Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Maj. Gen. Mohammed Hossein Baqeri, blamed the “savage” attack on “terrorists tied to global arrogance [i.e. the US] and the evil Zionist regime.”

Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehqan, military advisor to Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed harsh revenge. “We will come down hard on those who killed Martyr Mohsen Fakhrizadeh like thunder and make them regret their deed,” he said.

Neither Israel nor the US has commented on the assassination, although US President Donald Trump did retweet a statement from an Israeli journalist saying, “His death is a major psychological and professional blow for Iran.”

The BBC explained that the assassination occurred “amid fresh concern about the increased amount of enriched uranium” Iran is producing, since May 2018, when the US left the 2015 Iranian nuclear accord and began to re-impose sanctions.

Israel has long opposed that accord, claiming it would not prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

In April 2018, in an effort to persuade Trump to scrap the accord, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a televised presentation, in English, from Israel’s Defense Ministry.

His presentation was based on some 55,000 pages of documents and another 55,000 files on 183 CDs about Iran’s nuclear program. Israel had seized the material a few weeks before from a secret warehouse in Tehran. In that presentation, Netanyahu identified Fakhrizadeh as the key figure in Iran’s nuclear program.

A little over four months ago, in early July, a fire broke out at Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility. It caused “significant damage, setting back the country’s nuclear program by months, the government acknowledged,” The New York Times reported, “after initially saying the destruction was minor.”

A Middle Eastern intelligence official told the Times, “Israel was responsible for the attack” and had used “a powerful bomb.”

Since 1992, following the election of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, after the 1991 Gulf War that drove Iraq out of Kuwait, Israel has seen Iran as the main threat in the region.

Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, as US officials began to focus on a war with Iraq, after the initial assault on Afghanistan, Israeli officials argued the next target should be Iran. However, they failed to persuade the George W. Bush administration, which proceeded to launch the war to oust Saddam Hussein in early 2003.

Since then, Israel has regularly pressed the US to do more about the Iranian threat, and Trump has been the US president most receptive to their message. With Joe Biden set to take office on January 20, Israeli officials may well feel that they have only a limited window of time remaining to undertake decisive moves against Iran. 

Editing by John J. Catherine