Iran said Israel and the U.S. were probably behind the assassination of one of its top nuclear scientists Friday and vowed revenge, sharply escalating tensions in the Persian Gulf in the final weeks of Donald Trump's presidency.
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was the head of research and innovation at Iran's Ministry of Defense, according to a government statement. He was killed close to the Damavand campus of Islamic Azad University, about 37 miles east of central Tehran, the semiofficial Tasnim news reported.
"Terrorists murdered an eminent Iranian scientist today. This cowardice -- with serious indications of Israeli role -- shows desperate warmongering of perpetrators," Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said in a tweet, without offering any evidence for Israel's involvement. He called the killing an act of "state terror."
Iran's army said the U.S. also bore responsibility, according to the Iranian Labor News Agency.
Four other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed since 2010, with Tehran usually blaming the intelligence agencies of its foes Israel and the U.S.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once told the public to "remember that name" when talking about Fakhrizadeh.
His office declined to comment Friday, as did officials at the the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA.
One U.S. official -- along with two other intelligence officials -- said Israel was behind the attack. It was unclear how much the United States might have known about the operation in advance, but the two nations are the closest of allies and have long shared intelligence regarding Iran.
Some U.S. officials argued that the death of Fakhrizadeh would send a chilling message to the country's other top scientists working on the nuclear program: If we can get him, we can get you, too.
Without comment, Trump retweeted a post from veteran Israeli journalist Yossi Melman, an expert on the Israeli Mossad intelligence service, that called the killing a "major psychological and professional blow for Iran."
But while Fakhrizadeh had been a key figure in Iran's bomb program, "that work is all in the past, and there is no reason to expect that if Fakhrizadeh is gone it would have any effect on Iran's current nuclear program," said Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the CIA and a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security Studies.
Analysts said the timing of the attack appeared linked to the impending change of U.S. administrations.
"The operation reflects thinking of those in the Netanyahu government -- and/or the Trump administration -- who see these next few weeks as their last chance to make relations with Iran as bad as possible, in an effort to spoil the [President-elect Joe] Biden administration's efforts to return to diplomacy with Tehran," said Pillar.
Former CIA Director John Brennan, a strong Trump critic, tweeted that the attack was "a criminal act & highly reckless."
"It risks lethal retaliation & a new round of regional conflict," he wrote. "Iranian leaders would be wise to wait for the return of responsible American leadership on the global stage & to resist the urge to respond against perceived culprits."
'LIKE LIGHTNING'
Hossein Dehghan, an adviser to Iran's supreme leader, also blamed Israel -- and issued a warning.
"In the last days of their gambling ally's political life, the Zionists seek to intensify and increase pressure on Iran to wage a full-blown war," Dehghan wrote, appearing to refer to Trump's last days in office. "We will descend like lightning on the killers of this oppressed martyr and we will make them regret their actions!"
Brig. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, Iran's most senior military official, said in a statement that "we assure you that we will not rest until we track down and take revenge on those responsible for the assassination of martyr Fakhrizadeh."
Iranian officials and commentators from all political factions reacted with condemnation and defiance. Some also acknowledged that Fakhrizadeh's loss had created a significant void in the country's pursuit of nuclear science but vowed that it would not halt the development of what it has repeatedly described as a peaceful nuclear program.
The commander of the Revolutionary Guard, Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami, said "the assassination of our nuclear scientists is a clear violent war against our ability to achieve modern science."
Some Iranian officials and politicians voiced concern over what apparently was a yawning security hole that they said had allowed Israeli operatives to infiltrate Iran.
"Israel has camped out here in a bad way. The recent events of this year make this clear," a former vice president, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, said on Twitter. "Iran's security strategy should be to find Mossad's spies and informants."
Ordinary Iranians expressed anxiety that the pattern of covert operations, which started this year with the U.S. assassination of Gen. Qasem Soleimani, Iran's top security and intelligence commander, could cause a military confrontation between Iran and the United States.
In response to the killing of Soleimani, Iran fired missiles at bases housing American troops in Iraq, causing no fatalities but raising fears of a slide to war between the adversaries.
On Friday, hard-line protesters calling for war with the U.S. staged a demonstration in Tehran outside the residence of President Hassan Rouhani.
"No to submission, no to concession with America, only war with America!" a crowd of dozens of men chanted, as seen in videos shown on Iranian television and posted to social media.
The demonstrators also called for expelling the international inspectors who are monitoring Iran's nuclear program.
They held up signs reading "Silence is permission for more assassinations" and "Mr. President, they killed your minister's adviser. Stop negotiation."
Rouhani's administration was already facing a tough battle with the country's hard-line faction over any revival of the 2015 nuclear deal that the U.S. abandoned. Biden has said the U.S. could reenter the agreement if Iran returns to compliance.
The assassination is likely to harden the position of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has maintained that Washington cannot be trusted regardless of which party is in power.
Mohammad Imani, a prominent hard-line columnist for the Keyhan newspaper that serves as Khamenei's mouthpiece, wrote Friday that the "Gentlemen sitting across the negotiating table are the same terrorists of Baghdad airport" -- referring to the January assassination of Soleimani in a U.S. drone strike ordered by Trump.
Imani added: "We cannot trust them."
ON ISRAEL'S RADAR
Israel's leader had singled out Fakhrizadeh in an April 2018 presentation on Iran's nuclear program, claiming the scientist was the director of a secret project to develop nuclear weapons.
The United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has said "Project Amad" was mothballed in 2003, and Iran dismissed Netanyahu's presentations at the time as "lies and warmongering."
The assassination of Fakhrizadeh comes at a sensitive time in Iran as Trump's defeat in the Nov. 3 election offers an opportunity to reset ties with the West after years of economic and military confrontation.
Axios reported this week that Israel's government had instructed the military to prepare for a possible U.S. strike against Iran during the remainder of Trump's term, though it said the order wasn't based on intelligence or an assessment that the U.S. would order an attack.
Fakhrizadeh also was named in a March 2007 U.N. Security Council Resolution as having been involved in Iran's "nuclear or ballistic missile activities."
Israel has vowed to take any measures necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear warheads, which Tehran says it has never sought to develop.
A number of Fakhrizadeh's security guards were wounded in the attack, in which his car was shot at before a Nissan laden with explosives detonated 50 to 65 feet away, Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami told state TV.
Photos published by the semiofficial Fars news agency, purportedly from the scene, showed blood splattered on a tarmac next to an Iranian-made black passenger car with the window down on the driver's side. The car's windscreen had been shattered by several bullet holes.
Hatami said Fakhrizadeh was involved in an air-defense project for detecting spy aircraft without using radar systems. Iran's expanding missile program is a key concern for both the U.S. and Israel, but it's the nuclear issue that has been at the forefront.
Iran broke limits on the amount of low-enriched uranium it was allowed to store under the nuclear deal with world powers after Trump exited the accord and imposed sweeping economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
Tehran's store of low-enriched uranium increased to about 5,386 pounds from 4,640 pounds, according to the latest report by the U.N. monitors. That's enough of the heavy metal to create three bombs if Iran enriched the material to weapons-grade.
However, the current program is "now more focused on maintaining and developing nuclear weaponization capabilities rather than building the weapons themselves, said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington nonprofit that tracks nuclear-weapons proliferation.
He called the attack on Fakhrizadeh a "shocking and disturbing development."
"Soleimani and Fakhrizadeh were the architects of two pillars of Iran's security policy: its proxy and nuclear programs," said Ariane Tabatabai, an Iran expert with the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
"Both helped create the infrastructure and develop the programs. But their deaths won't lead to a fundamental change, as institutions will continue the projects."
Information for this article was contributed by Arsalan Shahla and Patrick Sykes of Bloomberg News; by Farnaz Fassihi, Ronen Bergman, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt of The New York Times; by Jon Gambrell, Amir Vahdat, Mohammad Nasiri and Deb Riechmann of The Associated Press; and by Kareem Fahim, Joby Warrick, Miriam Berger and Souad Mekhennet of The Washington Post.
