Iran Claims Satellite-Guided Tech Was Used in Fakhrizadeh’s Assassination

YERUSHALAYIM
This photo released by the Fars News Agency shows the scene where Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed in Absard, a small city just east of the capital Tehran, Iran, Nov. 27. (Fars News Agency via AP)

The killing of Iran‘s top nuclear scientist last month was carried out remotely with artificial intelligence and a machine gun equipped with a “satellite-controlled smart system,” Tasnim news agency quoted a senior commander as saying.

Iran has blamed Israel for the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was seen by Western intelligence services as the mastermind of a covert Iranian program to develop nuclear weapons capability. Tehran has long denied any such ambition.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for the killing, but in the past has acknowledged pursuing covert, intelligence-gathering operations against the nuclear program of its arch-enemy Iran.

The Islamic Republic has given contradictory details of Fakhrizadeh’s death in a daytime Nov. 27 ambush on his car on a highway near Tehran.

“No terrorists were present on the ground … Martyr Fakhrizadeh was driving when a weapon, using an advanced camera, zoomed in on him,” Tasnim, a semi-official agency, quoted Ali Fadavi, the deputy commander of Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards, as saying in a ceremony on Sunday.

“The machine gun was placed on a pick-up truck and was controlled by a satellite.”

Fadavi spoke after Iranian authorities said they had found “clues about the assassins”, though they have yet to announce any arrests. Shortly after Fakhrizadeh was killed, witnesses told state media that a truck had exploded before a group of gunmen opened fire on his car.

Last week Ali Shamkhani, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, said the killing was carried out with “electronic devices” with no people on the ground.

Experts and officials said last week Fakhrizadeh’s killing exposed security gaps that suggest its security forces may have been infiltrated and that the Islamic Republic is vulnerable to further attacks.

“Some 13 shots were fired at martyr Fakhrizadeh with a machine gun controlled by satellite…During the operation artificial intelligence and face recognition was used,” Fadavi said. “His wife, sitting 25 centimetres away from him in the same car, was not injured.”

Fakhrizadeh, identified by Israel as a prime player in what it says is a continuing Iranian quest for a nuclear weapon, was the fifth Iranian nuclear scientist killed in targeted attacks since 2010 inside Iran, and the second slaying of a high-ranking Iranian official in 2020.

The commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq in January. Tehran retaliated by firing missiles at U.S. military targets in Iraq.

Separately, Israeli intelligence services have in the past recruited an Iranian official close to the nuclear physicist and recorded a conversation in which he spoke of his efforts to produce “five warheads” on behalf of the Islamic Republic, Israeli media reported Friday.

Senior Arab intelligence officials told Yisrael Hayom that the fact that Iranian officials provided different and sometimes contradictory versions of the events surrounding the assassination of such a high-profile nuclear scientist indicates the great embarrassment prevailing among the Islamic republic’s leadership over the incident.

“As time goes by, frustration grows in Tehran over the fact that they have no clue about who was involved in the assassination and how it was executed,” one official said. “What is clear is that these were professional, highly skilled assassins.”

He further dismissed reports that Mujahedin-e-Khalq, an Iranian terror organization that recently made explicit threats against Fakhrizadeh, was involved, saying, “There is no chance that this organization has the ability to carry out such a professional operation.”

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