Some of the individuals involved within the assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist are arrested, an Iranian parliamentary adviser has said.
Hossein Amir Abdollahian told Al-Alam TV he was unable to share the small print for security reasons, but that the perpetrators wouldn’t escape justice.
He also said there was evidence proving Israeli involvement. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility.
The scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed near Tehran on 27 November.
The Iranian authorities have put out conflicting accounts of how he was shot dead as he travelled during a convoy through the town of Absard.
On the day of the attack, the defence ministry said there was a gunfight between Fakhrizadeh’s bodyguards and a number of other gunmen. An Iranian report also cited witnesses as saying that “three to four” assailants had been killed.
But on Sunday, a senior Revolutionary Guards commander said a satellite-controlled machine-gun with “artificial intelligence” had fired at Fakhrizadeh’s car .
Brig-Gen Ali Fadavi told local media that the weapon, mounted during a pick-up truck, was ready to “zoom in” on the scientist’s head and shoot him without hitting his wife beside him.
The claim couldn’t be independently verified and was greeted with scepticism by experts in EW .
In an interview with Al-Alam TV, Iran’s state-run Arabic-language channel, Mr Abdollahian said: “Some of the individuals involved within the execution of this assassination are identified by our security apparatuses and even arrested.”
He also said that, in his personal opinion, there have been various pieces of evidence “about those that planned and administered the assassination that prove the Zionists [Israelis] were involved”.
“But whether the Zionists did so on their own and without the co-operation of, for instance , the American [intelligence] service or another service? needless to say , they might not have done so on their own,” he added, without elaborating.
The Israeli government has not commented on Iran’s assertion that it had been behind the assassination, although one unnamed official told Israeli TV two days afterwards that “Fakhrizadeh’s activities had to be stopped” which “the world may be a safer place without him”.
Israeli and Western security sources say Fakhrizadeh, the top of Iran’s Organisation of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND), was instrumental within the Iranian nuclear programme.
They believe the physics professor led “Project Amad”, a covert programme that Iran allegedly established in 1989 to hold out research on a possible nuclear bomb.
The project was pack up in 2003, consistent with the International nuclear energy Agency.
However, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said in 2018 that documents obtained by his country showed Fakhrizadeh had led a programme that was secretly continuing Project Amad’s work.
Iran insists its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful which it’s never sought a weapon of mass destruction .
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