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Alleged assassin of Iranian physicist pleads guilty, but doubts remain

Majid Jamali-Fashi appeared in a Tehran court today to plead guilty to the assassination of Masoud Alimohammadi, a particle physicist at the University of Tehran who was killed by a bomb explosion on 12 January 2010.

The Guardian says that:

Jamali-Fashi confessed to having attached a remote-control bomb to a motorcycle parked on the street, which detonated and killed Ali-Mohammadi while he was leaving home for work in January 2010.

As our story noted at the time of the killing:

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that the killing was perpetrated by the country’s “enemies” and was designed to hamper its scientific and technological progress.

Although the regime described Alimohammadi as a nuclear scientist, he was a theoretical particle physicist involved in the SESAME project to build a synchrotron in Jordan.

Prosecutors said that Jamali-Fashi had been paid US$120,000 by Israel’s national intelligence agency, Mossad, to carry out the murder, according to Press TV.

“I met one of the Israeli intelligence agents for the first time in the Turkish city of Antalya. A high-ranking Mossad official had also met with me two times in Azerbaijan and briefed me on the stages of my trip to Israel,” Fashi said.

But Al Arabiya news notes that the Iranian opposition website Rooz Online is sceptical of the confession.

“Fashi said in his televised confessions that he traveled to Israel three times. How could he have done that without arousing the suspicions of the Iranian authorities?” said the Rooz Online statement.

The statement mocked the details about the tools Fashi allegedly used to facilitate the operations he was to carry out like a communication belt, bullet-proof clothes, mobile phone with infra-red camera, and a motorcycle that connects digitally to Tel Aviv. “This [information] is taken from one of those American action movies.”

Alimohammadi is not the only Iranian physicist to be targeted. In November 2010, Nature reported that:

Majid Shahriari was killed, and his wife injured, on his way to work at the Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran when attackers on motorcycles attached a bomb to his car on 29 November. Another nuclear scientist, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, and his wife, survived an identical simultaneous attack.

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    patricia haramati said:

    How refreshing to read a report that attemps to go deeper into Iran’s statement. Just about anyone would confess to anything if they were tortured. There is more to this story than meets the eye

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