On 27 November, Iran’s top nuclear physicist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, died in a hospital after gunfire and a car bomb attack on the outskirts of Tehran.
Iran’s semi-official ‘Mehr news agency’ reported words of Commodore Ali Fadavi, deputy commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), “The machine gun was equipped with artificial intelligence to target Martyr Fakhrizadeh.”
Since the attack, mixed accounts of his death have evolved. Although early news accounts said that he was trapped in a gunfight with his bodyguards, others believed that a remote-controlled machine gun fired at him, installed on a pick-up truck driven by someone who later fled the country.
On Sunday, Fadavi Said, the gun fired a total of 13 shots at Fakhrizadeh and managed to target him with such exactness that his wife, sitting a few inches away from him in the same vehicle, didn’t report a single injury. 11 bodyguards in separate cars were also following the couple at that time, he added.
He was driving on a highway east of the capital when the weapon “zoomed in”, a machine gun using “artificial intelligence,” Mehr said on Sunday, quoting Commodore Ali Fadavi.
Further told by him, “The head of the protection team was also shot four times because he threw himself on Fakhrizadeh, and no enemy was on the scene to shoot the guards.”
Sequentially, This is the second incident of targeted based killing of a high-ranking Iranian official since January, when outgoing US President Donald Trump ordered a drone strike on General Qassem Soleimani.
Tehran has blamed Israel for Fakhrizadeh’s killing. Since 2010, this is the fifth assassination of a nuclear scientist on Iranian soil, Israel has not commented on the allegations. However, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had singled out the scientist in a power-point presentation on Iran’s nuclear program in April 2018.
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