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| Members of the Iranian forces carry the coffin of nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh at the Imam Khomeini’s Shrine in Tehran on Nov. 29. (Khodabakhsh Malmir/WANA/Reuters) |
We don’t know who exactly gunned down a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist on Friday. But there’s already an expert consensus — confirmed by a senior U.S. official to my colleagues — that Israel was behind the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, slain in a roadside ambush outside the Iranian capital Tehran. If true, it adds to a long record of alleged clandestine Israeli activity within Iran, including previous assassinations and recent sabotage attempts on the country’s nuclear program.
Iranian authorities view Fakhrizadeh’s killing as an act of terrorism and have vowed retaliation at the “right time,” potentially through proxies elsewhere in the Middle East. A statement from the European Union labeled the incident a “criminal act” and urged all parties in the region to “exercise maximum restraint in order to avoid escalation which cannot be in anyone’s interest.” The Trump administration and the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remained circumspect in their silence through the weekend.
“Fakhrizadeh was widely regarded as the brains behind Iran’s nuclear program, including Tehran’s clandestine efforts to develop a nuclear bomb in the early 2000s,” my colleagues reported. “The physics professor, believed to be about 60 years old, has been identified by intelligence officials as the head of the Amad Plan, the secret nuclear weapons research program that sought to develop as many as six nuclear bombs before Iranian leaders ordered a halt to the program in 2003.”
The Washington Post
