Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the mastermind of Iran’s nuclear bomb program and a brigadier general in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, was killed on Friday in an assassination which Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, blamed on Israel. Fakhrizadeh ambushed in his car and later died in hospital.
Western experts suggested Fakhrizadeh’s killing was as debilitating to Iran’s aggressive designs against its neighbors as the elimination of Qasem Soleimani in January.
Seyyed Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran issued a statement saying “follow-up and the definite punishment for the perpetrators and commanders of the terror must be on the agenda.”
Iran’s Supreme National Security Council reportedly convened an emergency meeting attended by senior military commanders.
Iran’s Parliament is seeking to mandate the government to end the inspections of Iranian nuclear and military installations by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Tehran Times reported Saturday, citing a lawmaker.
“A statement condemning the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh will be read out in an open session of the Majlis tomorrow, mandating the government to retaliate quickly against US and Israeli terrorist leaders and to reduce the level of the Agency’s inspections of nuclear and military facilities to zero,” MP Nasrollah Pezhmanfar tweeted.
The remarks came one day after Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who headed the Iranian Defense Ministry’s Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND), was killed in his car near Absard city outside Tehran.
Early in 2018, Israeli sources admitted that Mossad had been on its way to assassinate Fakhrizadeh, but the operation was called off at the last minute. In his famous video that exposed Iran’s stash of nuclear-related documents retrieved by the Mossad, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu singled out Fakhrizadeh:
Netanyahu’s office declined to comment on last Friday’s operation.
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh Mahabadi, 63, was a professor of physics at Imam Hussein University in Tehran and a brigadier general in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. A UN Security Council resolution in 2007 identified him as a senior scientist in the Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics and the former head of the Physics Research Center (PHRC) at Lavizan-Shian.