China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Iran to avenge colonel’s killing, president vows
TEHERAN — Iran will avenge the killing of a Revolutionary Guard colonel who was shot dead in Teheran, President Ebrahim Raisi warned on Monday.
Colonel Hassan Sayyad Khodaei was killed on Sunday outside his home by assailants on motorcycles.
It was the most high-profile killing inside Iran since the November 2020 murder of top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
Raisi said: “I insist on the serious pursuit (of the killers) by security officials, and I have no doubt that the blood of this great martyr will be avenged.
“There is no doubt that the hand of global arrogance can be seen in this crime,” he added, echoing what the Guards said the previous day.
Khodaei’s funeral was due to take place in Teheran late on Monday.
The IRNA official news agency said Khodaei was killed by five bullets as he returned home at around 4 pm on Sunday.
The agency published pictures showing a man slumped over in the driver’s seat of a white car, with blood around the collar of his blue shirt and on his right arm. He was strapped in with his seat belt, and the front window on the passenger side had been shot out.
The Fars semiofficial news agency reported that the state prosecutor had visited the scene of the killing and ordered the “quick identification and arrest of the authors of this criminal act”.
The Guards said they had arrested several “thugs linked to the intelligence agency of the Zionist regime”, as Iran calls Israel.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, which oversees the intelligence agency Mossad, declined to comment on the events in Teheran.
At least six Iranian scientists and academics have been killed or attacked since 2010.
Raisi’s comment on the killing came just ahead of his visit to Oman on Monday.
The relations between Iran and Gulf Arab states have seen a “breakthrough” since Raisi assumed office in 2021, an Iranian diplomat said on Sunday.
‘Constructive steps’
Iran and Saudi Arabia have taken “positive and constructive steps” toward resolving their differences, Ali Reza Enayati, the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s undersecretary for diplomatic affairs, said in an interview with the IRNA.
He also mentioned the earlier dispatch of Iranian representatives to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, or OIC, headquartered in Saudi Arabia where their cooperation with the OIC was facilitated by Saudi officials.
The Iranian official hoped that further negotiations between the two major regional Muslim states would pave the way for the participation of Iranian pilgrims in the annual Hajj in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic ties with Iran in early 2016 in protest against attacks on its diplomatic missions in Iran following the kingdom’s execution of a Shiite cleric.