Who was Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the assassinated Iranian nuclear scientist?

Team Udayavani, Nov 29, 2020, 11:25 AM IST

A top Iranian scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, believed to be responsible for developing the country’s military nuclear program was killed Friday, Nov 27

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was in a vehicle that came under attack from armed terrorists. In the shootout between Fakhrizadeh’s bodyguards and the terrorists, the scientist was seriously wounded and taken to hospital

Fakhrizadeh died in hospital after an attack in Absard, in Damavand county. Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, has condemned the killing “as an act of state terror”.

Fakhrizadeh was  a member of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and has been compared by The New York Times to J Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist who was the director of the Los Alamos laboratory during the development of the world’s first atomic weapons

As reported by BBC, A professor of physics, Fakhrizadeh is said to have led Project Amad, the alleged covert programme that was established in 1989 to research the potential for building a nuclear bomb.

It was shut down in 2003, according to the IAEA, though Mr Netanyahu said the documents retrieved in 2018 showed Fakhrizadeh led a programme which secretly continued Project Amad’s work.

Why was he killed?

According to BBC, Two possible motives stand out: firstly, to jeopardise potential improvements in relations between Iran and the new Biden administration in the United States. And, secondly, to encourage Iran to engage in a retaliatory act.