Calls rise for payback over scientist’s killing
The Iranian defense minister vowed Monday to find and punish those responsible for the assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, while another senior official offered an account of the attack radically different from initial reports in Iranian state news media.
“We chase the criminals to the end,” the defense minister, Brig. Gen. Amir Hatami, said at a ceremony mourning Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was shot and killed outside Tehran on Friday while traveling with his bodyguards.
Iranian state news outlets initially reported that gunmen had killed Fakhrizadeh in a roadside ambush after a truck explosion — and even interviewed a supposed witness. But speaking at the funeral Monday, Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of the country’s Supreme National Security Council, said Israel had carried out the attack using sophisticated “electronic devices.”
He did not elaborate, but the Fars news agency, an affiliate of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, said the assassination was carried out with a machine gun operated by remote control.
The new version of events, which could not immediately be confirmed, seemed to represent a coordinated effort at damage control by the nation’s security apparatus after a public and official backlash following the embarrassingly public assassination of Fakhrizadeh, which Western intelligence officials have said was carried out by Israel.
At the funeral at the headquarters of the Defense Ministry, photographs and footage showed a procession carrying Fakhrizadeh’s coffin, covered with flowers and draped with the Iranian flag.
It was the latest expression of fury at the death of Fakhrizadeh, who for two decades was the intellectual force behind what U. S. and Israeli intelligence described as Iran’s covert nuclear weapons program, although Iran maintains that its nuclear program is for peaceful uses only.
Though he did not specify how, Hatami said the country would take to heart the commands of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, to punish the perpetrators and commanders behind the killing. Tehran is assembling an elite group to capture and prosecute the perpetrators, Iran’s judiciary chief, Ayatollah Ebrahim Raisi, said Monday. Members include the attorney general and select members of the armed forces and intelligence services.
The calls for retribution heightened concerns that the situation could escalate. Over the weekend, Germany urged all sides to refrain from retaliatory actions in the last weeks of the Trump administration to preserve hopes for renewed negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program once Joe Biden assumes the presidency. President Trump withdrew the United States from the deal in 2018 and reimposed stringent sanctions on Iran.