Iran said on Thursday it had arrested “some elements” working with Western spy agencies and connected to the murder of a senior nuclear scientist, amid claims Tehran’s scientists were the targets of “terrorists.”
“The three spy agencies of Mossad, CIA and MI6 had a role in the [attacks] and, with the arrest of these people, we will find new clues to arrest other elements,” Iranian Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi was quoted as saying on state television’s Web site.
Moslehi did not say how many people were arrested or what specifically they are accused of. He only said they were a part of a “major group” that took part in the killing and that planned to carry out “widespread missions.”
On Monday, unidentified assailants attached bombs to the cars of two prominent scientists in Iran’s nuclear program.
Twin blasts killed one, Majid Shahriari, and wounded the other, Fereydoon Abbasi Davani. Three other people were also wounded.
Iran immediately blamed the attacks on the intelligence services of the US and Israel, which suspect Tehran’s nuclear ambitions harbour a military dimension. The Islamic republic denies the charge.
Iran’s atomic chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, said in a report on Thursday that security for nuclear scientists would be stepped up.
“Based on a recent decision, it has been arranged that the security detail [of nuclear scientists] will be multiplied and other protection techniques will also be applied,” Salehi was quoted as saying by ISNA news agency.
“Dr Shahriari was not alone as he was with his security detail,” Salehi said. “But the evil methods that enemies employ are unpredictable.”
“Since last year, we put under protection ... hundreds of our scientists and experts working in the nuclear field,” Salehi said.
In January, another nuclear scientist, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, was killed in a bomb attack Tehran blamed on “mercenaries” in the pay of Israel and the US.
Meanwhile, Iran’s envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, charged that UN Security Council members were to blame for the attacks on scientists by publishing the names of physicists involved in Iran’s nuclear program in sanctions resolutions.
“Those experts and scientists who have been fully cooperating with [UN] inspectors, their names have immediately gone to the sanction lists of the European Union and United Nations Security Council. Now they are targeted and they are killed, one by one,” Soltanieh said on the sidelines of an IAEA board meeting in Vienna.
“Those who are proponents of the resolutions of the UN Security Council and put the names of these scientists [on the lists], they are responsible for this blind assassination by terrorists,” Soltanieh said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS