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Iran Blames British Intelligence for Assassinations of Scientist in Official Letter
16 January 2012
Citing a quote by Sir John Sawers, head of British MI-6, the Iranian government said in a protest letter to the British Foreign Ministry that assassination of Iran nuclear scientists started immediately after Sawers "declared beginning of intelligence operation against Iran," reported the Iranian news service, IRNA, on Jan. 14, 2012. On October 28, 2010, Sawers accused Iran of pursuing "clandestine nuclear activities," and said covert operations are crucial to stop Tehran’s nuclear program, reported Iran’s Press TV at the time. "Stopping nuclear proliferation cannot be addressed purely by conventional diplomacy. We need intelligence-led operations to make it more difficult for countries like Iran to develop nuclear weapons," Sawers said, according to Press-TV. A month after Sawers’ statement, a terrorist car bombing identical to the January 11, 2012 hit, killed Dr. Majid Shahriari and wounded Dr. Fereydoun Abbasi — both professors at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran. Iran also delivered a letter of protest to the U.S. interests section at the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, claiming that it has concrete information about CIA involvement in training Iranians for terrorist and sabotage operations inside Iran. IRNA reports that the U.S. has never responded to previous Iranian evidence of U.S. covert training of terrorists. Unlike previous assassinations of scientists, the latest killing of the 32-year old Dr. Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan has sparked protests in the population. Photos of the young scientist with his toddler son are all over the Internet, and thousands of mourners marched through Tehran at his funeral, chanting against Israel and the U.S. for carrying out the assassination. The controversy over the killing of Roshan has also fed into the spread of the article by historian Mark Perry in Foreign Policy that reports on Israeli "false flag" operations inside Iran, in which Israelis posed as the CIA in the recruitment, training, and deployment of Jundallah terrorists. Perry’s article has been posted on hundreds of websites and blogs since its release on Jan. 13. |