Iran marks 11th anniversary of top nuclear scientist’s assassination

Iran is marking the 11th anniversary of the assassination of its nuclear scientist, Majid Shahriari. Shahriari was one of several Iranian scientists assassinated in just over a decade with Iran pointing the finger at Israel and the US.

The target of the brazen assassination on the streets of Tehran 11 years ago was not a political figure, as one might expect, but a scientist. Shahriari was on his way to university on Nov. 29, 2010 when assassins on a motorbike attached explosives to his car and detonated them, martyring him in cold blood just days before his 44th birthday.

He was a nuclear science and technology professor at Shahid Beheshti University. He studied at Amirkabir and Sharif universities of technology, two prestigious universities in the Iranian capital. His expertise covered a wide array of nuclear scientific fields, including reactors, fuel cycles and radiotherapy engineering. He was involved in designing and constructing nuclear reactor core simulators.

On the day that Shahriari was assassinated, a similar attempt was made on the life of another Iranian nuclear scientist, Fereydoon Abbasi. But he miraculously survived. Those attacks came just months after the assassination of another nuclear scientist, Masoud Alimohammadi. Two other experts, Darioush Rezaeinejstad and Moafa Ahmadi Roshan, were also assassinated in the next two years. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, martyred near the Iranian capital last year, was the latest in the string of such assassinations.

Iranian officials have blamed Israel for carrying out the assassinations with the complicity of the US and the terrorist Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO). Numerous Western reports have confirmed the veracity of the claim while Israeli officials have never denied culpability. The intention of the assassinations has been described as impeding Iran’s nuclear program, a campaign that has also included sanctions and acts of sabotage against Iranian nuclear facilities.

ME