Iranian dissidents have long suspected that the country’s Islamist regime of using its blatant hostility toward Israel as a way of cracking down on internal opponents.
Reports have emerged that indicate that a leading Iranian nuclear scientist, whose death was blamed on Mossad, might have, in fact, been killed by his own government.
A prominent opposition blogger based in London says that discrepancies in the recent trial and execution of the “Israeli spy” officially charged with killing scientist Masoud Ali Mohammadi provide more evidence that Iranian intelligence agents may have been the real assassins, ABC news reported.
The nuclear physicist was killed in January 2010 when he walked past a motorcycle that was parked outside his house and detonated by remote control.
The Islamic regime immediately blamed the assassination on a “triangle of wickedness,” referring to Israel, the United States and their “hired agents.”
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad alleged, “Zionists did it. They hate us and they don’t want us to progress.”
Ali Larjani, chairman of the Iranian parliament, said the government had “clear information that the intelligence regime of the Zionist regime and the CIA wanted to implement terrorist acts.”
However, Western intelligence agencies have voiced doubt as to whether Mohammadi was actually involved in Iran’s nuclear program.
Iranian dissidents, however, claim that Mohammadi had been killed by the regime because he was a supporter of reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, whom many believe actually won the 2009 Iranian presidential election before vote-tampering led to Ahmadinejad’s victory, ABC reported.
Iranian authorities claimed that Majid Jamali Fashi, 24, was recruited and trained by Mossad and was paid $120,000 to kill Mohammadi.
More than two years later, on May 15, 2012, the Iranian government executed the alleged Arab hitman.
In January 2011, Fashi confessed, to receiving forged travel documents in Azerbaijan to travel to Israel, Iran’s Press TV reported.
Fashi said he “received different training including chasing, running, counter-chasing and techniques for planting bombs in a car” while in Tel Aviv.
However, In a blog post Monday the London-based blogger, Potkin Azarmehr, pointed out that the Israeli passport displayed by Iranian television was stamped 2003, when Fashi was 15 years old, but bore the photo of a man in his 20s, who was not looking directly into the camera and was too hairy for the average 15 year-old. “No passport will be issued with such a picture, anywhere in the world,” wrote Azarmehr. “You need a headshot where you are open-eyed AND looking into the camera.”
