An Iranian nuclear scientist has been killed near Tehran, authorities said.
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated earlier today in an ambush in Absard, a village just east of the capital which is a retreat for the Iranian elite.
While no one claimed responsibility for the attack, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif pointed the finger at Israel, calling the killing an act of ‘state terror.’
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He wrote on Twitter: ‘Terrorists murdered an eminent Iranian scientist today.
‘This cowardice – with serious indications of Israeli role – shows desperate warmongering of perpetrators.’
Hossein Dehghan, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader and a presidential candidate in Iran’s 2021 election also blamed Israel.
Israel has yet to comment on the assassination but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once told the public to ‘remember that name’ when talking about Fakhrizadeh.
Iranian state television said an old truck with explosives hidden under a load of wood blew up near a sedan carrying the scientist.
As Fakhrizadeh’s car stopped, at least five gunmen emerged and sprayed thevehicle with rapid-fire, the semiofficial Tasnim news agency said.
Fakhrizadeh was pronounced dead at hospital after doctors failed to revive him.
Others wounded in the attack 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.
The attack comes just days before the 10-year anniversary of the killing of Iranian nuclear scientist Majid Shahriari that Tehran also blamed on Israel.
That and other targeted killings happened at the time that the so-called Stuxnet virus, believed to be an Israeli and American creation, destroyed Iranian centrifuges.
Fakhrizadeh led Iran’s so-called Amad program that Israel and the West have alleged was a military operation looking at the feasibility of building a nuclear weapon.
Tehran long has maintained its nuclear program is only for civilian purposes.
It comes just as US President-elect Joe Biden is due to be inaugurated in January and will likely complicate his efforts to return America to an agreement aimed at ensuring Iran does not have enough highly enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon.
A previous deal, which saw Iran limit its uranium enrichment in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions, has entirely unravelled after current American president Donald Trump withdrew from the accord in 2018.
Trump himself retweeted a posting from Israeli journalist Yossi Melman, an expert on the Israeli Mossad intelligence service, about the killing.
Melman’s tweet called the killing a ‘major psychological and professional blow for Iran.’
Photo Credit: Getty
