Top Iranian officials on Friday pointed to Israel as the likely
culprit in the assassination of top nuclear scientist Mohsen
Fakhrizadeh, with some vowing revenge for the death of the man Jerusalem
has pointed to as the head of the country’s nuclear weapons program.
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif claimed there were “serious indications of [an] Israeli role” in the assassination.
“Terrorists murdered an eminent Iranian scientist today. This
cowardice — with serious indications of Israeli role — shows desperate
warmongering of perpetrators,” Zarif wrote on Twitter.
He also called on the international community to “end their shameful double standards and condemn this act of state terror.”
Hossein Dehghan, an adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei
and a presidential candidate in Iran’s 2021 election, issued a warning
on Twitter.
“In the last days of their gambling ally’s political life, the
Zionists seek to intensify and increase pressure on Iran to wage a
full-blown war,” Dehghan wrote, appearing to refer to US President
Donald Trump. “We will descend like lightning on the killers of this
oppressed martyr and we will make them regret their actions!”
Iran’s military chief Mohammad Bagheri accused “the malicious
Zionist entity of committing a brutal act.” He said Fakhrizadeh’s death
was “a “major blow to the Iranian defense system.”
But Bagheri promised that “the path started by the likes of
Fakhrizadeh will not stop” and said that “terrorist groups, commanders
and elements involved in this cowardly act [should know] a difficult
retaliation awaits them.”
Hossein Salami, chief commander of the paramilitary Revolutionary
Guards, tweeted: “Assassinating nuclear scientists is the most violent
confrontation to prevent us from reaching modern science.”
Yadollah Javani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards’
political bureau, said that “the Zionists are behind many of these
assassinations.”
Claiming Iran was “one of the main victims of terrorism” in the
world, Javani lamented that “the United States and European countries
also support the Zionist regime… Countries that ostensibly claim to
fight terrorists but in practice support terrorists.”
Israel declined to immediately comment on the killing of Fakhrizadeh,
who Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once called out in a news
conference saying: “Remember that name.” Israel has long been suspected
of carrying out a series of targeted killings of Iranian nuclear
scientists nearly a decade ago.
In this photo released by the official
website of the office of the Iranian Presidency, President Hassan
Rouhani, right, listens to Chief of the General Staff of the Armed
Forces Gen. Mohammad Hossein Bagheri during the army parade
commemorating National Army Day in front of the shrine of the late
revolutionary founder Ayatollah Khomeini, just outside Tehran, Iran on
April 18, 2019. (Iranian Presidency Office via AP)
State TV said Fakhrizadeh was attacked by “armed terrorist elements.”
He died at a local hospital after doctors and parademics couldn’t
revive him.
The semiofficial Fars news agency, believed to be close to the
country’s Revolutionary Guard, said the attack happened in Absard, a
small city just east of the capital, Tehran. It said witnesses heard the
sound of an explosion and then machine gunfire. The attack targeted a
car that Fakhrizadeh was in, the agency said.
Others wounded, including Fakhrizadeh’s bodyguards, also were taken to a local hospital, the agency said.
The killing comes just days before the 10-year anniversary of the
killing of Iranian nuclear scientist Majid Shahriari, which Tehran also
blamed on Israel. Those targeted killings came alongside the so-called
Stuxnet virus, believed to be an Israeli and American creation, that
destroyed Iranian centrifuges.
Fakhrizadeh led Iran’s so-called “Amad,” or “Hope” program. Israel
and the West have alleged it was a military operation looking at the
feasibility of building a nuclear weapon in Iran. Tehran long has
maintained its nuclear program is peaceful.
The International Atomic Energy Agency says Iran “carried out
activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device” in
a “structured program” through the end of 2003. That was the Amad
program, which included work on the carefully timed high explosives
needed to detonate a nuclear bomb.
Iran also “conducted computer modeling of a nuclear explosive device”
before 2005 and between 2005 and 2009, the IAEA has said. The agency
said, however, that those calculations were “incomplete and fragmented.”
Netanyahu asserted in 2018 that Fakhrizadeh continued to lead Iran’s
nuclear weapons efforts, despite the 2015 nuclear deal meant to prevent
Tehran from constructing such weapons.
Gen. Hossein Dehghan, a military adviser
to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran, Iran,
November 18, 2020. (Vahid Salemi/AP)
Fakhrizadeh’s assassination comes less than two months before Joe Biden is to take office as US president.
Biden has promised a return to diplomacy with Iran after four hawkish
years under incumbent US President Donald Trump, who withdrew from the
Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and began reimposing crippling sanctions.
Trump said at the time that the deal did not offer sufficient guarantees to stop Tehran from acquiring an atomic bomb.
