62 assassins in on it
Iran-doc slay a massive op
The assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was carried out by a highly trained hit squad of 62 people — pouncing in six vehicles after the local power supply was cut, according to reports.
The killers — whom Iranian officials have insisted were sent by Israel — included a team of 50 giving “logistical support” to the dirty dozen who carried out the ambush Friday, local sources told Iranian journalist Mohamad Ahwaze.
All of the perpetrators had “entered special training courses, as well as security and intelligence services abroad,” Ahwaze tweeted, as translated by ELINT News.
“The team knew exactly the date and course of the movement of the Fakhrizadeh protection convoy in the smallest details,” Ahwaze wrote, allowing the attackers to cut the scientist off as he traveled to his private villa in Absard, Tehran Province.
Shortly before Fakhrizadeh drove through the ambush site, the team
“cut off the electricity completely from this area” to slow reports of the attack and calls for help.
Fakhrizadeh was traveling in the middle vehicle among three bulletproof cars, with the killers striking after the first car entered a roundabout, the report said.
A booby-trapped Nissan was then detonated to block the car behind Fakhrizadeh — as 12 gunmen pounced on him, arriving in a Hyundai Santa Fe and four motorcycles, Ahwaze tweeted.
“After the car bomb was detonated, 12 operatives opened fire towards Fakhrizadeh’s car and the first protection vehicle,” the reporter said. “The leader of the assassination team took Fakhrizadeh out of his car and shot him and made sure he was killed.”
None of the hit-squad members was wounded or arrested following a gunbattle with the top Iranian official’s bodyguards, Ahwaze said.
Tensions between Iran and Israel escalated sharply after Israel was quickly accused of ordering the hit.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed “definitive punishment of the perpetrators and those who ordered it.”
He called Fakhrizadeh “the country’s prominent and distinguished nuclear and defensive scientist.” Analysts have compared him to being on a par with Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who led the US Manhattan Project in World War II that created the atomic bomb.
A hard-line Iranian newspaper ran an opinion piece Sunday that urged Iran to attack the Israeli port city of Haifa in the hopes of causing “heavy human casualties” in retaliation.
Such a strike would “definitely lead to deterrence, because the United States and the Israeli regime and its agents are by no means ready to take part in a war and a military confrontation,” Iranian analyst Sadollah Zarei wrote in Kayhan, a paper whose editor-in-chief reportedly serves as an adviser to Khamenei.
Iran’s parliament also held a closed-door hearing about Fakhrizadeh’s killing on Sunday, with lawmakers chanting, “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!”
Afterward, parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf told Iranian state radio that there would be harsh retaliation because “the criminal enemy does not regret it except with a strong reaction.”
Israel has placed its embassies around the world on high alert after Iranian threats of retaliation, Israeli N12 news reported Sunday.
UN nuclear inspectors have said Fakhrizadeh’s military nuclear program was disbanded in 2003. But Israeli suspicion of Tehran’s atomic program and his involvement has never ceased.
Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israeli military intelligence who now serves as the director of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, alleged Fakhrizadeh ran “all covert activities with weaponization of the program.”
Israel, suspected of killing other Iranian nuclear scientists over the past decade, has not commented on the killing of Fakhrizadeh.