Latest news with #MohsenFakhrizadeh
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Family of Kurd executed by Iran deny allegations linking him with Mossad
Iran's judiciary has executed Kurdish porters under charges including "moharebeh" (enmity against God), and "efsad-e fel-arz" (corruption on earth). Iran's judiciary ordered the execution of three Kurdish porters on the day the ceasefire between Israel and Iran was announced, BBC's Farsi site reported on Friday, quoting the family of one of the three, who insisted that he was innocent. According to the report, the three were arrested two years ago on charges of collaborating with the Mossad by allegedly smuggling equipment to be used in the assassinations of Iranian officials. The judiciary is continuing arrests of dozens of Afghan refugees, Kurdish porters, and Iranian citizens on charges including "moharebeh" (enmity against God), and "efsad-e fel-arz" (corruption on earth), both of which can carry the death penalty. "If someone is even slightly guilty, would they go on their own feet to a place where they know they will be arrested? He was innocent," the cousin of one of those executed claimed. The daughter of one of the executed porters is asking for the autonomous Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq to assist in bringing her father's body home. His family reportedly stated that they will not believe their relative was executed until they see his body. However, the KRG told the BBC that they have not received a formal request to assist in returning the body. Kurdish porters often work across the border between KRG and Iran, transporting goods that are usually pre-packaged. The porters do not open the packages because Iranian buyers will only accept unopened goods, BBC reported. "Even if the Islamic Republic's claim is true, and these porters were transporting equipment for Mossad, Mossad would never tell them that it is for an assassination. Mossad can hide explosives in a pager, so it certainly can hide them in cigarette or perfume boxes," BBC cited a KRG security official as saying. "We have no evidence that equipment has been smuggled from Kurdistan to Iran. Mossad has high-level influence in Iran and doesn't need porters in border villages," the official added. According to the report, the three Kurds were alleged to have been transporting equipment used by Mossad to assassinate nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Human rights organizations speak out against Iranian execution Human rights organizations are concerned that the executions were an attempt to "terrorize the population" of Iran rather than to punish the actual perpetrators of any crimes, following Israel's airstrikes in June. The three Kurds were executed "without a fair trial and based on confessions extracted under torture," BBC cited Director of Iran Human Rights, Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, as saying. Activists also condemned the executions as "rushed and unjust." Solve the daily Crossword
The National
5 days ago
- Politics
- The National
Iran executes alleged Mossad agent Rouzbeh Vadi amid increase of death penalties
A man convicted of spying for Israel was executed in Iran on Wednesday, after the Supreme Court upheld his sentence. He had passed information about a nuclear scientist killed during the 12-day war with Israel in June. Rouzbeh Vadi, who authorities accused of espionage for Mossad, allegedly transferred sensitive information after in‑person meetings in Vienna and received cryptocurrency payments. His execution was carried out privately, with minimal public announcement. 'Roozbeh Vadi … was executed following judicial proceedings and confirmation of his sentence by the Supreme Court,' the judiciary's Mizan Online website said. Mr Vadi's case followed an intensified campaign by Tehran to crack down on alleged Israeli espionage within Iran. Iran regularly announces the execution of those convicted of having worked for foreign intelligence services. After the war broke out with Israel on June 13, Iranian authorities pledged swift trials for suspects arrested for collaborating with its arch-foe. Tehran suffered significant blows to its nuclear programme during the war and Israel boasted about its use of Mossad agents on the ground to carry out covert operations. Since then, Iran has announced several executions related to spying for Israel. In June, Tehran executed three Kurdish men accused of aiding Mossad in the assassination of prominent nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-further signalling an aggressive posture against suspected Israeli intelligence activity. Meanwhile, human rights organisations warn of a broader pattern: an authoritarian state using the death penalty to stifle dissent, including executions of political opponents and those accused of espionage, without due process. At least 612 people were executed between January-June 2025, an increase of 119 per cent compared to the same period last year when 279 executions were recorded, Iran Human Rights said in June.
The National
5 days ago
- Politics
- The National
Iran executes alleged Mossad agent amid increase of death penalties
A man convicted of spying for Israel was executed in Iran on Wednesday, after the Supreme Court upheld his sentence. He had passed information about a nuclear scientist killed during the 12-day war with Israel in June. Rouzbeh Vadi, who authorities accused of espionage for Mossad, allegedly transferred sensitive information after in‑person meetings in Vienna and received cryptocurrency payments. His execution was carried out privately, with minimal public announcement. 'Rouzbeh Vadi … was executed following judicial proceedings and confirmation of his sentence by the Supreme Court,' the judiciary's Mizan Online website said. Mr Vadi's case followed an intensified campaign by Tehran to crack down on alleged Israeli espionage within Iran. Iran regularly announces the execution of those convicted of having worked for foreign intelligence services. After the war broke out with Israel on June 13, Iranian authorities pledged swift trials for suspects arrested for collaborating with its arch-foe. Tehran suffered significant blows to its nuclear programme during the war and Israel boasted about its use of Mossad agents on the ground to carry out covert operations. Since then, Iran has announced several executions related to spying for Israel. In June, Tehran executed three Kurdish men accused of aiding Mossad in the assassination of prominent nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-further signalling an aggressive posture against suspected Israeli intelligence activity. Meanwhile, human rights organisations warn of a broader pattern: an authoritarian state using the death penalty to stifle dissent, including executions of political opponents and those accused of espionage, without due process. At least 612 people were executed between January-June 2025, an increase of 119 per cent compared to the same period last year when 279 executions were recorded, Iran Human Rights said in June.
Euronews
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Euronews
Mossad was behind 2020 killing of top Iranian scientist, report claims
New details have emerged about the 2020 assassination of senior Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, which Tehran blamed on Israel's Mossad spy agency. Israel has never publicly claimed responsibility, including during or after the flare-up in hostilities between the two countries in June. However, the latest Jerusalem Post report has claimed that Fakhrizadeh was first shot while sitting in his vehicle on 27 November 2020. Believing he might still survive, operatives continued to fire at him after he exited the car and attempted to flee. He died shortly thereafter, according to an Israeli newspaper. The new information appears to support Iran's official account of events as made public by Major General Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council. Shamkhani said at the time that Fakhrizadeh was killed by a remote-controlled machine gun linked to a satellite system. Israeli intelligence sources later confirmed that a weapon matching that description - a US-made M240C 7.62mm machine gun - was smuggled into Iran in parts and assembled over eight months by a Mossad team of roughly 20 operatives. The gun was reportedly mounted in a blue Zamyad pickup truck parked along Imam Khomeini Street in Tehran and operated remotely to minimise risk to Fakhrizadeh's wife, who was travelling with him at the time of the assassination. A second vehicle equipped with cameras is said to have been used to confirm the scientist's identity moments before the ambush. The claims could not be independently verified. Fakhrizadeh, long regarded by Western and Israeli intelligence as a central figure in Iran's nuclear programme, was declared a "martyr" by Iranian authorities and given a state funeral. According to Iranian sources, the Mossad had considered targeting Fakhrizadeh as early as 2009, under then-director Meir Dagan, but internal debate over the feasibility of such an operation reportedly delayed any action. By 2020, Fakhrizadeh's operational role may have become more replaceable, but his strategic importance and access to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were reportedly undiminished. His killing is widely believed to have set back Iran's nuclear ambition by months or even years, while enhancing Israel's covert operational and intelligence capabilities.
Daily Mail
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Behind-the-scenes details on Israeli campaign of sabotage against Iran
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was driving to his holiday home in Absard, 50 miles east of Tehran, when Mossad caught up with him. The father of Iran 's nuclear programme since the 1990s was driving his Nissan Teana luxury saloon with his wife in the passenger seat beside him and his bodyguards travelling in cars ahead and behind them. As they passed a pickup truck on the Imam Khomeini Boulevard, a machine gun opened up – an M240C firing 7.62mm rounds, standard issue for the US army. But this was not an attack by American special forces. In fact, there was no one in the truck with the weapon at all. Fakhrizadeh was hit by multiple bullets. After his car veered to a halt, he fell out of the door and collapsed, dying in a pool of his own blood. At first the Iranian media had no idea how the assassination was carried out. Wild theories involving gunmen on motorcycles, a truck bomb and a platoon of special forces were aired. But the truth was more extraordinary than that. Over a period of eight months, the machine gun was smuggled into Iran in pieces, along with explosives, and secretly assembled by a 20-man team, who also tracked Fakhrizadeh's every move. As one agent put it, Mossad 'breathed with the guy, woke up with him, slept with him, travelled with him. They would have smelled his aftershave every morning if he had used aftershave.' On the day of the assassination, a truck fitted with cameras was placed at the roadside, apparently 'broken-down', about three-quarters of a mile before the kill site – a position selected because it offered a good line of sight. As Fakhrizadeh's Nissan came into range, the machine gun's telescopic sight used artificial intelligence to lock on to Fakhrizadeh's face, fired 13 times and hit its target with such accuracy that his wife was not injured. It then self-destructed, blowing up the truck too. Israeli sources later confirmed to me that this was not science fiction, a remote-controlled gun was indeed used – though they stopped short of taking credit for the kill. This episode occurred in November 2020 but is typical of the fiendishly ingenious tactics employed by Israel's intelligence agency, the most formidable service of its kind in the world. Its extraordinary power was on display once again this month in Operation Rising Lion, the campaign of mass sabotage, destruction and assassination against Iran launched on June 13, in the most complex opening to any war fought in human history. And it prepared the ground for an offensive that culminated in the surgical strike on Iran's nuclear sites by B-2 bombers of the US Air Force equipped with bunker-busters. The unofficial codename given to Israel's long-term policy for crippling Iran's military machine, wrecking its air defences and hampering its nuclear programme was 'Death by a thousand cuts'. The difference now is that all the cuts are coming at once. Apart from the 200 fighter-bomber jets flying sorties around the clock, hundreds of special forces soldiers have been operating secretly inside Iran, along with untold numbers of spies and double agents. With weapons and munitions smuggled across the border, they have set off numerous car bombs and generally wreaked havoc. Meanwhile, swarms of drones – operating from covert warehouses in Iran itself – have delivered their explosive payloads with pinpoint precision. Plus clusters of rockets, shells and ballistic missiles have hit targets the length and breadth of the country. Even civilians have got involved. On Thursday, it emerged an Israeli telecoms executive working in Europe had been asked to help design a device that looked like a low-tech mobile phone but which could transmit encrypted data disguised as social media traffic. And a techie working at an Israeli health start-up was asked to tweak an algorithm he had worked on during his military service, to enable a dedicated server to sift through satellite images of fuel trucks and identify which ones were carrying missile propellant rather than petrol. All this is ultimately the brainchild of one man – the head of Mossad since 2021, David Barnea. He's the same top-level espionage chief who masterminded the exploding pager attacks that wiped out the high command and middle-ranking officers of Lebanon's terrorist organisation Hezbollah last year. Little wonder that within Mossad he is known as 'a gadget-loving killing machine'. Indeed, the Iranians have become so paranoid that a hardline MP this week called for all 'commanders, senior officials, nuclear scientists — and even their families' to jettison their mobile phones. Barnea almost never speaks to journalists but, in the course of co-writing my book Target Tehran – which attracted global attention last week after Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was pictured with a copy of it on his office desk – I found ways to build up a detailed portrait of him. In the process I built up a detailed portrait of the man who is masterminding the war against Iran – laying plans and launching operations so ingenious that sheer panic is now spreading throughout the Islamic Republic. The heads of Iran's government, its army and its nuclear facilities literally don't know what has hit them... nor what will hit them next. By taking out the linchpin of Iran's nuclear programme, Israel inflicted one of the deepest of its thousand cuts. Until then, perhaps the most damaging had been a heist executed by Mossad in southern Tehran, a blow as audacious as it was embarrassing to the Ayatollahs' regime – the theft of all their nuclear secrets. On January 31, 2018, two dozen Israeli spies and Iranian double agents broke into a drab warehouse with a corrugated iron roof in the industrial Shirobad district. They used blowtorches to break into a series of steel vaults before starting to remove files, both paper and electronic, that detailed every step of Iran's nuclear research going back 30 years. Over the next six-and-a-half hours, they loaded half a tonne of printouts and compact discs on to a truck before making their escape. By the time the Iranians discovered the break-in, multiple decoy vehicles were speeding in all directions to various borders. The materials from this heist convinced America and Israel's other allies, including the UK, that Iran truly was intent on building nuclear weapons. This was not a repeat of the Iraqi 'super gun' shambles, which involved a Canadian engineer trying to persuade Saddam Hussein that he could develop a huge artillery piece capable of firing missiles into orbit. Tehran was already very close to producing the enriched uranium it needed to make a bomb. At the time, the head of Mossad was Yossi Cohen, a boisterous and charismatic man known for his dapper dress sense. Cohen is an alpha male, the kind of man who dominates the room. His protege and successor, Barnea, is quite different: calm, understated, quietly spoken, a man you might not notice – and perhaps wouldn't remember if you did see him. Like Cohen, he began his career as a case officer, recruiting and handling agents in enemy territory, as well as a two-year spell as deputy head of Keshet, Mossad's eavesdropping division. But he also served in Sayeret Matkal, a key Israeli army Special Forces unit – as did Naftali Bennett, who had just become prime minister of the newly elected coalition government when Barnea took over Mossad. Bennett, an expert on Iran, insisted on frequent intelligence briefings, and between them the two men agreed on the 'death by a thousand cuts' policy. They understood that the fundamentalist Islamic Republic was loathed by many ordinary Iranians, much as the Soviet Union was hated by millions of its citizens during the Cold War. And the Ayatollahs, like the Politburo, were bound to fall if enough pressure was applied. 'The regime is profoundly incompetent and fairly corrupt,' Bennett told me. 'Large swathes of land don't get water. You turn on the taps and you get mud. And people are very frustrated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC], the Iranian armed forces.' Three weeks after Barnea took charge of Mossad, the security services struck a direct blow against Iran's nuclear facilities, in a meticulously planned assignment that now appears to have been a test run for Operation Rising Lion. A plant near Karaj, about 25 miles west of Tehran, was attacked by a quadcopter drone which was able to drop a bomb on its roof – then returned to its launch location 10 miles away, ready to fly a future mission. The factory, which manufactured parts for the centrifuges essential for uranium enrichment, was associated with the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran [AEOI]. Tehran denied that the attack had caused significant damage but, for the next six months, international inspectors were denied permission to visit the plant. This was a message to Ayatollah Khamenei and his ministers. Mossad now had free rein to be as aggressive as necessary. 'We've been suckers,' Bennett said. 'Iran's goal was to weigh us down fighting in Gaza and Lebanon, while they sit back happy in Tehran. They have to pay a direct price when they use proxies to hit us. Every time Hamas or Islamic Jihad shoots a rocket at an Israeli city, someone will pay a price in Iran.' One of those who received a bill from Mossad, according to my sources and foreign reports, was Colonel Hassan Sayyad Khodaei, the head of Unit 840, a secretive IRGC force operating outside Iran against Western targets and opponents of the regime. Khodaei was gunned down by two assailants on a motorcycle as he sat in his car outside his home in downtown Tehran. Images on social media showed him slumped in the driver's seat with the front passenger window shot out. The assassination was the first on Iranian soil of an official not connected to the nuclear programme. This attack too can be seen as a dress rehearsal for Operation Rising Lion. Where targets were too well protected to be hit by drones, human assassins might be used. It's impossible to know how many Israeli agents and commandos, both male and female, are inside Iran right now, but many will have been embedded for years. Some might be disguised as loyal servants of the government, even trusted insiders such as bodyguards or nuclear workers. But others could be taking advantage of the deep divisions within Iranian society. The Islamic regime is Shi'ite but in a country of 92million people, a sizeable percentage come from entirely different cultures: Sunnis, Kurds, Balochs and more. Some of them regard the Tehran government as occupiers in regions that should not even be part of Iran – and, on the basis that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend', might be willing to lend support to Israeli special forces. The successes of Operation Rising Lion have been astounding. They include the clinical removal of three very senior figures: the head of the Iranian armed forces, the commander of the IRGC and the commander of Iran's Emergency Command. 'These are three ruthless mass murderers with international blood on their hands,' the Israeli Defence Force posted on social media. 'The world is a better place without them.' And then, to underline the message, Israel's foreign minister Gideon Sa'ar announced that the replacement head of the armed forces, General Gholam Ali Rashid, had also been eliminated after just three days in his post, with a car bomb. 'I would recommend that whoever takes on the post considers carefully,' Saar said sarcastically, 'and if they accept, they should exercise extra caution.' Several top nuclear scientists have also been killed, including one who was in his apartment in a tower block. Photographs showed a drone-shaped hole in the side of the building and blast damage to a single room. Neighbouring flats on adjacent floors were apparently unscathed. But another dimension to the strikes was perhaps even more important, even if it generated fewer headlines. Iran's air defences have been effectively neutralised. And these were the first to go, because their removal was crucial if Israeli jets were to be able to attack the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility. The regime was proud of its S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems, purchased at huge expense from Russia after 10 years of pleading. The S-300 is specifically designed to be deadly against F-15 and F-16 jets. These comprise a large part of Israel's main strike force, ideal for dropping glide bombs on targets. In October last year, Israel destroyed all the S-300s, ostensibly as revenge for a massive Iranian ballistic missile assault. We can now see this manoeuvre as one more far-sighted preparation for Operation Rising Lion. My book, Target Tehran, predicted the war against Iran and, though no one could have foreseen all the ruses Mossad used, I envisaged in detail the waves of fighter-bombers after Iran's air defences were obliterated. Israel is fighting for its existence. And Mossad will be merciless.
