An Iranian “nuclear scientist” who worked at Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility has been killed in a bomb attack on his car in Tehran, with officials immediately blaming Israel.
By Barney Henderson
(The Telegraph)
Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, “has been working as the deputy in charge of commerce at the Natanz site,” said a posting on the website of Sharif University in Tehran, from which Ahmadi Roshan graduated around a decade ago.
The killing of Roshan was similar to previous assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists that Tehran has blamed on Israel and the United States. Both countries have denied the accusations.
“The responsibility of this explosion falls on the Zionist regime,” the governor of Tehran province, Safar Ali Bratloo, told Iran’s Arabic-language Al-Alam broadcaster.
“The method of this terrorist action is similar to previous actions that targeted Iran’s nuclear scientists,” he said.
The car was attacked outside the east Tehran campus of Allameh Tabatai University, where Roshan was reportedly a lecturer.
“This morning a motorbiker attached a bomb to a Peugeot 405, which exploded,” the deputy governor of Tehran province, Safar Ali Bratloo, was quoted as saying by the ILNA news agency.
Witnesses told Reuters they had seen two people on the motorbike fix the bomb to the car. As well as the person killed in the car, a pedestrian was also killed. Another person in the car was gravely injured, they said.
Two daylight bomb attacks on the same day in Tehran in November 2010 killed one nuclear scientist and wounded another.
Iran then blamed Israeli, British and U.S. intelligence for the attacks, which it said were aimed at assassinating key people working on Iran’s nuclear programme.
Iran denies Western suspicions that its nuclear programme has military goals, saying it is for purely peaceful purposes.
There was no immediate word from Israeli officials. Israel has always declined to comment on previous such bombings in Iran.
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