Iranian security forces inspect the site where the magnetic bomb attached to a car by a motorcyclist exploded outside a university in Tehran.
Iran said one of its nuclear scientists was killed today by a magnet bomb fixed to his car by a motorcyclist and blamed Israel for the attack, intensifying diplomatic tensions the West over Tehran’s nuclear program.
The bombing, which Iranian officials said bore all the hallmarks of assassinations of other nuclear scientists in the past years, came as Washington sought to persuade a skeptical China to help efforts to toughen sanctions against Iran.
Iran has blamed Israeli, British and US intelligence for the attacks in the past, which it said were aimed at assassinating key people working on Iran’s nuclear program. Both Israel and the United States have rejected the claims.
«The bomb was a magnetic one and the same as the ones previously used for the assassination of the scientists, and is the work of the Zionists,» Tehran Deputy Governor Safarali Baratlou told the semi-official Fars news agency, referring to Israel.
«Iran’s enemies should know they cannot prevent Iran’s progress by carrying out such terrorist acts,» state news agency IRNA quoted First Vice-President Mohammad Reza Rahimi as saying.
Heightened tensions over the nuclear program, which major oil producer Iran insists is purely for civilian use but Western powers suspect has military goals.
The European Union has brought forward to January 23 a ministerial meeting that is likely to confirm an embargo on oil purchases, and big importers of Iranian oil are moving to secure alternative supplies. Iran is the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) second biggest exporter.
The victim was a nuclear scientist who «supervised a department at Natanz uranium enrichment facility,» Fars said.
Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation confirmed in a statement that chemistry engineer Mostafa Ahmadi-roshan was part of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and vowed not to be deflected from its development of nuclear technology:
«America and Israel’s heinous act will not change the course of the Iranian nation,» it said.Witnesses told reporters they had seen two people on the motorcycle fix the bomb to the car. As well as the person killed in the car, a pedestrian was also killed. Another person in the car was gravely injured, they said.
Other Iranian media also reported the death but there were differing accounts of the killing.
Two daylight bomb attacks on the same day in Tehran in November 2010 killed one nuclear scientist and wounded another. Physics lecturer Masoud Ali Mohammadi was killed in January 2010, when a remote-controlled bomb attached to a motorcycle exploded near his car in Tehran.
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