Iran's state-run Fars News Agency (FNA) is accusing Israel's international intelligence agency of killing the country's nuclear scientists.
The news agency quoted a report posted Wednesday on the IranNuc.ir website that said the Mossad “has a long record in assassinating Arab and Muslim scientists in collaboration with its U.S. and British counterparts (CIA and MI6).”
The report listed nearly a dozen scientists from Egypt, Lebanon and elsewhere whom it claimed were assassinated by the Mossad.
Among those was Iranian university professor and nuclear scientist Massoud Ali Mohammadi, who died in a Tehran bombing in January 2010. But it was the death of Majid Shahriari in November 2010 that caught the world's attention, FNA opined.
“Global attention was redirected to Mossad's terror plots for assassinating the nuclear scientists of the Islamic world after Iranian professor Majid Shahriari was killed by the Israeli spy agency in Tehran late in 2010,” the news agency reported.
Shahriari and another Iranian university professor, Fereidoon Abbasi Davani, were killed in two separate bomb blasts in Tehran on November 29.
Their deaths were followed by that of a young Iraqi nuclear scientist who was gunned down in the streets of Baghdad the following month, according to the report. Mohammed al-Four had just published his new uranium enrichment formula in a number of western journals before he died. The news agency openly accused the Mossad of shooting him to death, although there has been no evidence linking Israel to the murder.
Other alleged assassinations of Muslim scientists by the Mossad, claimed by the news agency, include:
- Yahiya Amin al-Mashd, Samireh Mousa – both Egyptian
- Mostafa Ali Moshrefah (“the Arab World's Einstein”)
- Ramal Hassan Ramal (Lebanese physicist)
- Hassan Kamel Sabbah (Lebanese physicist dubbed “the Arab World's Edison”)
- Samir Najib, Nabil al-Qolaini, Nabil Ahmad Folayfel, Jamal Hamdan, Saeed Sayyed Badir, Salvi Habib (Iranian and others)
Iran frequently assigns blame to "foreign enemies" for murders, terrorist attacks and anarchy in its midst, most often pointing the finger at the State of Israel, which together with the United States and many Western nations, is convinced the Islamic Republic is working towards developing a nuclear weapon of mass destruction.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has often vowed to "wipe the Zionist entity off the map" in his public addresses. Despite the imposition of four rounds of increasingly severe economic sanctions by the United Nations Security Council, Iran has consistently refused to stop its nuclear development program to enrich uranium, which appears aimed towards bringing the substance up to weapons-grade level - despite denials that it is intended for peaceful domestic purposes.