A revelation by an intelligence minister comes after Tehran initially blamed Israel for the assassination of the country’s top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
Tehran, Iran – A member of Iran’s armed forces was involved in the November massacre of the country’s top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, according to the intelligence ministry.
“Martyr Fakhrizadeh was a member of the armed forces and the man who first prepared for the assassination was also a member of the armed forces,” Information Minister Mahmoud Alavi said in an interview with state television Monday without extension.
“We can’t do intelligence work in the field of the armed forces,” he said.
Fakhrizadeh was murdered in broad daylight in late November while driving a car with his wife in Absard, a city in the Tehran region.
Officials had said Israel carried out the attack by using a satellite-controlled robot gun mounted behind the rear of a construction truck that exploded afterwards.
Israel has not officially responded to the allegation, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had claimed in 2018 that Fakhrizadeh was in charge of a secret nuclear weapons program.
“Remember that name,” Netanyahu had said at the time, regarding Fakhrizdaeh.
Iranian officials said Fakhrizadeh was deputy defense minister at the time of the massacre and had worked on “nuclear and missile defense”.
Iran has once again denied ever having a nuclear weapons program.
According to Alavi, the intelligence ministry had warned Iran’s security apparatus of a threat against Fakhrizadeh two months before the attack took place and had even identified the scene of the murder five days earlier, but did not they know the time.
‘We asked someone [the armed forces] come and sit down and work on the issue but unfortunately what happened happened before they could bring in a representative and we could work on it, ”said the minister.
Reporting by Maziar Motamedi in Tehran