LONDON — A bomber on a motorcycle killed a scientist from Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment site and his bodyguard-driver on Wednesday during the morning commute in Tehran, Iranian media reported, in an assassination that could further elevate international tensions over the Iranian nuclear program and stoke the country’s growing anti-Western belligerence.
http://liarcatchers.com/executive_protection.html
It was the fourth such attack reported in two years and, as after the previous episodes, Iranian officials said they believed that the United States and Israel were responsible.
Iranian news accounts said the suspected assassin had attached a magnetized explosive device to the scientist’s car and escaped during the rush hour in northern Tehran. News photographs from the scene showed a car, a Peugeot 405, draped in a pale blue tarp being lifted onto a truck. Some photographs published by Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency showed what it said was the body of the scientist still inside the car. The head was covered with a white cloth.
The scientist was identified as Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, 32, a professor at a technical university in Tehran, and a department supervisor at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant — one of two known sites where Western leaders suspect Iranian scientists are advancing toward the creation of a nuclear weapon.
The Mehr news agency said the explosion took place on Gol Nabi street, on the scientist’s route to work, at 8:20 a.m. The news agency said he was employed at the Natanz site as the director of commercial affairs.
Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but is facing a growing battery of international sanctions intended to force it to halt its enrichment program and negotiate with the West. On Jan. 23, European Union foreign ministers are to discuss a possible oil export embargo, adding further pressure.
Despite those pressures, Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization said it would not be diverted from its pursuit of nuclear technology. “America and Israel’s heinous act will not change the course of the Iranian nation,” it said in a statement quoted by Reuters.
The semiofficial Fars news agency, which has close links to the powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps, said the Wednesday bombing resembled the methods used in attacks in November 2010 against two other nuclear specialists — Majid Shahriari, who was killed, and Fereydoon Abbasi, who survived and is now in charge of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.
Almost exactly two years ago in January 2010, a physics professor, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, was also assassinated in Tehran.
Iran blamed Israel and the United States for the attacks in 2010, and the latest killing is bound to deepen an embattled mood in Tehran as the country’s divided leaders approach parliamentary elections in March. News of the blast emerged quickly on Iran’s state-run media.
“The bomb was a magnetic one and the same as the ones previously used for the assassination of the scientists and is the work of the Zionists,” Fars quoted Tehran’s deputy governor, Safar Ali Baratlou, as saying, reflecting a suspicion that the West and its allies were waging a covert war.
Theodore Karasik, a security expert at the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis in Dubai, said the assassination fit a pattern over the past two years of covert operations by the West and its allies to “degrade and delay” Iran’s nuclear program.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Karasik said other elements of the Western campaign included the deployment of a computer virus known as Stuxnet and the sale of doctored computer software to hamper the enrichment program.
He said magnetic bombs were used in covert operations, describing them as “clean, easy and efficient.”
In recent days, several events have combined to create the deepest tension with the United States since the Islamic revolution in 1979 and the subsequent seizure of hostages at the American Embassy in Tehran.
Last weekend, Iran’s top nuclear official said the country was about to start production at its second major uranium enrichment site, in a defiant declaration that its nuclear program would continue despite the sanctions.
The announcement came two months after the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear oversight body based in Vienna, published a report that Iranian scientists had engaged in secret and possibly continuing efforts to construct a nuclear weapon.
The imminent opening of the site — the Fordo plant, near the city of Qum — confronted the United States and its allies with difficult choices about how far to go to limit Iran’s nuclear abilities. The new plant is buried deep underground on a well-defended military site and is considered far more resistant to airstrikes than the existing enrichment site at Natanz, limiting what Israeli officials, in particular, consider an important deterrent to Iran’s nuclear aims.
