Posted Tuesday, January 12, 2010 4:48 PM
Was an Iranian Nuclear Physicist Killed by His Own Government?
Babak Dehghanpisheh
As Middle East intrigue goes, it doesn't get much stranger than this: at approximately 8 a.m. this morning, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a nuclear physics professor at Tehran University, was killed by a bomb outside his home in a quiet northern suburb of Tehran. This may not have seemed that odd if it had taken place in Baghdad or Kabul. But assassinations─particularly with a remote-control bomb hidden inside a motorcycle─are not common in Iran.
A Foreign Ministry spokesman quickly pointed fingers outside the country's borders, blaming Israel and the United States for the killing as a means of thwarting the country's nuclear program. Obama administration officials emphatically deny any U.S. involvement in the murder. Fars News, a wire service affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, ran an item alleging that a pro-monarchy group had claimed responsibility. Fars also ran an article claiming the professor was devout and had worked with the Revolutionary Guards until six years ago.
But several opposition Web sites have printed a statement showing Ali Mohammadi's name among 420 Tehran University instructors who had pledged their support for candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi last June. Other accounts on opposition Web sites are more explicit. "[Ali Mohammadi] was Green all the way!" writes one of his former students in the Dalan Sabz blog. The student describes how Ali Mohammadi had encouraged his class to join the post-election protests and allegedly brought in a minibus to take some out to join the crowds. Several other students wrote in with similar accounts on the blog.
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These reports on the opposition Web sites, though they can't say so directly, are obviously insinuating that Ali Mohammadi was killed because of his political views, not his ties to the nuclear program. A New York Times report says he specialized in particle and theoretical physics, not making nuclear bombs. And the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, for its part, has denied that Ali Mohammadi worked on the nuclear program.
Still, there are similarities to the case of Shahram Amiri, another university researcher working for the Atomic Energy Organization who went to Mecca last summer and never came back. The Iranian government has accused Saudi Arabia of handing Amiri over to the United States, but there are many unanswered questions. If Ali Mohammadi was assassinated, it would be seen as a clear message to anyone privy to the country's nuclear info to keep quiet. (And if he really was sympathetic to the Green wave, he might have been considered likely to talk out of turn.)
Ali Mohammadi's death has had a chilling effect on the staff at Tehran University. One employee at the university says that a climate of fear has settled over the campus today. One week ago, 88 Tehran University professors wrote a letter to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei asking that the government stop using violence against protesters. It's hard to imagine that a similar letter would be sent out now. "The explosion of a bomb in front of a university professor's house isn't a simple occurrence," Ali Maqari, the head of Tehran University's College of Science, told the Mehr News Web site, hinting that academics would be paying special attention the investigation.
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