Striking distance
Remote-control gun killed Iran scientist
Iran’s top nuclear scientist was assassinated from more than a football field away using a remote-controlled machine gun in a car — which then exploded, according to a local media report.
The semiofficial Fars news agency gave the wild description of Friday’s attack on Mohsen Fakhrizadeh outside Tehran, which it said was carried out in three minutes.
The scientist — who founded Iran’s military nuclear program in the 2000s — was traveling with his wife in a bulletproof car with three security vehicles when he heard gunfire and got out to see what was going on, the agency reported.
That’s when the remote-controlled rifle started blasting him from a Nissan parked about 164 yards away before the car exploded.
Fakhrizadeh was hit three times, including by a bullet that severed his spine, the agency said.
Iranian-owned Arabic-language channel Al-Alam claimed that the weapons used in the attack, allegedly perpetrated by Israel, were “controlled by satellite.”
The two accounts contradict earlier Iranian reports that the Nissan exploded first before Fakhrizadeh was ambushed by a hit squad of at least 12 gunmen including snipers.
A top Iranian security official made a similar allegation of a remote-controlled device at Fakhrizadeh’s funeral on Monday.
“Unfortunately, the operation was a very complicated operation and was carried out by using electronic devices,” Ali Shamkhani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, said at the ceremony.
“No individual was present at the site.”
Shamkhani also blamed Iranian exile group Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) for “having a role in this,” without elaborating.
A spokesman for MEK, which has been suspected of assisting Israeli operations in Iran in the past, dismissed Shamkhani’s remarks as “rage, rancor and lies” sparked by the group’s earlier exposés of Iran’s nuclear program.
Israel — suspected of killing several Iranian nuclear scientists over the past 10 years — has not officially commented on Fakhrizadeh’s death.
Israeli intelligence minister Eli Cohen told Tel Aviv radio station 103FM on Monday that he did not know who was responsible for the attack.
Meanwhile, Iran-controlled Press TV reported Monday that “weapons” used in the assassination were made in Israel.
“The weapons collected from the site of the terrorist act bear the logo and specifications of the Israeli military industry,” an unnamed source told the English-language outlet.