Iran Sentences 3 People to Death Over Assassination of Nuclear Scientist

Three people have been sentenced to death in Iran after being convicted of spying for Israel in relation to the assassination in 2020 of a top nuclear scientist, according to an Iranian news agency.
The semi-official Fars news agency quoted an Iranian judiciary spokesman, Asghar Jahangir, as saying the three unidentified individuals had “transferred equipment for the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.”
Jahangir said they had been sentenced to death “at the preliminary stage” of the prosecution.
Fars said a fourth defendant was sentenced to death in connection with another unspecified incident of espionage.
On Nov. 27, 2020, Fakhrizadeh was shot and killed in Absard city near Damavand, which is around 40 miles east of Tehran.
The Jewish Chronicle newspaper, in February 2021, claimed that Fakhrizadeh had been killed by a 1-ton gun smuggled into Iran in pieces by Mossad agents, some of whom were Iranian nationals, but Israel did not comment on the incident.
At the time, Iran said Fakhrizadeh was “severely wounded in the course of clashes between his security team and terrorists and was transferred to hospital,” where he later died.
But both stories came from anonymous sources, and in September 2021, Iran denied any killer robot had been involved in the incident.
According to the Fars report, Jahangir said the three convicted individuals—whose nationalities were not given—were “operating under the guise of alcoholic drink smugglers in Iran’s West Azerbaijan province.”
West Azerbaijan province, in the northwest of Iran, has a border with both Turkey and Iraq.
Jahangir, according to Fars, said the three sentenced to death had a right to appeal.
The Iranian judiciary spokesman added, “Iranian security forces identified the Zionist regime’s spies in different provinces and arrested eight spies in West Azerbaijan province.”
Western intelligence agencies had considered Fakhrizadeh the chief architect of Iran’s controversial nuclear program, potentially overseeing the development of a nuclear weapon on behalf of the regime.
The Fars report said Fakhrizadeh had been on Israel’s hit list since at least 2007.
Gobadi said Ali Khamenei, who took over as supreme leader in 1989, “systematically intensified” the nuclear weapons program in the early 1990s and saw it “as a strategic guarantee for the regime’s survival.”
The Iranian judiciary has reportedly indicted a total of 14 individuals for involvement in Fakhrizadeh’s assassination.
Since Fakhrizadeh’s death, the Iranians have continued their nuclear enrichment program, the first stage toward making a weapon.
In February, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, said the Iranians had continued to enrich uranium well beyond the need for commercial nuclear use.
In May, the IAEA reported Iran was producing approximately 11 kilograms (24 pounds) of uranium enriched to 60 percent uranium-235 per month.
Olle Heinonen, a former deputy director general of the IAEA, said it could take “days” for Iran to go from 60 percent to weapons-grade enriched uranium.
But he told The Epoch Times, “The stumbling block here, most likely, is actually making the actual new components of the weapon.”
On Wednesday, an Israeli government spokesman said of the Fars report: “We never comment on such matters. There has been no change in our position.”