This Article is From Nov 30, 2010

Top Iran nuclear scientists attacked, one killed

Top Iran nuclear scientists attacked, one killed
Tehran: Unidentified assailants riding motorcycles carried out separate bomb attacks here on Monday against two of the country's top nuclear scientists, killing one and prompting accusations that the United States and Israel were again trying to disrupt Iran's nuclear program.

The slain scientist, Majid Shahriari, managed a "major project" for the country's Atomic Energy Organization, Iran's nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, told the semiofficial IRNA news agency. His wounded colleague, Fereydoon Abbasi, is believed to be even more important; he is on the United Nations Security Council's sanctions list for ties to the Iranian nuclear effort.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that "undoubtedly the hand of the Zionist regime and Western governments is involved" in the attacks. He also publicly acknowledged, apparently for the first time, that the country's nuclear program had been disrupted recently by malicious computer software that attacked its centrifuges.

The two scientists are among the most prominent in the Iranian nuclear world, and the brazen daylight attacks on them seemed certain to worsen tensions over the country's controversial uranium enrichment efforts.

Israel and the United States have often signaled that they will not tolerate a nuclear Iran. Neither has acknowledged pursuing sabotage or assassinations there, but both are widely believed to be pursuing ways to undermine the country's nuclear program short of bombing reactor sites, including damaging the centrifuges to slow down the production of enriched uranium.

"They're bad people, and the work they do is exactly what you need to design a bomb," said a federal official who assesses scientific intelligence and spoke on condition of anonymity. "They're both top scientists."

Philip J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman, did not address the Iranian accusations in detail. "All I can say is we decry acts of terrorism wherever they occur and beyond that, we do not have any information on what happened," he said.

Diplomatic efforts to stop the Iranian nuclear program appear to have failed, and this year, the United Nations and Western powers imposed a new, tougher round of sanctions. On Oct. 29, Iran said it was willing to resume talks with the European Union over its nuclear program, a step that American officials view as a sign that the sanctions were having an effect on Iran's troubled economy. Iran has delayed a major economic reform package, apparently concerned about possible unrest if prices for basic goods rise further.

Dr. Shahriari published dozens of esoteric conference reports and peer-reviewed articles on nuclear research, at least five of which list Mr. Salehi, the Iranian nuclear agency chief, as a co-author. He was an expert on neutron transport, a field that lies at the heart of nuclear chain reactions in bombs and reactors. Some Iranian media reports said he taught at the Supreme National Defense University, which is run by the Iranian Army.

The United Nations describes Dr. Abbasi as a senior scientist in the Ministry of Defense "working closely" with Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps whom Western intelligence considers a leader in Tehran's effort to acquire a nuclear warhead. The federal analyst said that Dr. Abbasi was more deeply entwined with secretive aspects of the Iranian effort than was his slain colleague.

"Abbasi is the big one," the analyst said. "He goes way, way back."

Mr. Salehi issued an angry warning to the Western powers and their allies on Monday, saying "the patience of the Iranian people has its limits."

"If our patience runs out," he said, "you will suffer the consequences."

Mr. Ahmadinejad, speaking at a news conference, vowed that the nuclear program would continue, but acknowledged damage from the computer worm. "They succeeded in creating problems for a limited number of our centrifuges with the software they had installed in electronic parts," he said.

Iranian officials had previously acknowledged unspecified problems with centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium that can be used for peaceful energy generation or atomic weapons. But the Iranians had always denied that the problems were caused by malicious computer code.

A worm known as Stuxnet is believed to have struck Iran over the summer. Experts said that the program, which is precisely calibrated to send nuclear centrifuges wildly out of control, was probably developed by technicians working for a government.

Mr. Ahmadinejad did not specify the type of malicious software or those behind it, but said that "fortunately our experts discovered that, and today they are not able anymore" to damage Iran's centrifuges.

The motorcycle attackers attached the bombs to the professors' cars, then drove off, detonating them from a distance, according to Iranian news media reports. Dr. Abbasi's wife was also hurt, the reports said.

Last January, a remote-controlled bomb killed a physics professor, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, outside his home. The Iranian authorities also blamed that attack on the United States and Israel, a charge the State Department dismissed as absurd.

In 2007, state television said that another nuclear scientist, Ardeshir Hosseinpour, had died of gas poisoning.

Both Dr. Mohammadi and Dr. Shahriari were associated with a nonnuclear scientific research unit, based in Jordan and operating under United Nations auspices, known as Sesame, for Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East. Unusually, its nine-member council includes representatives from Israel, along with Iran and other Muslim countries. It was not clear whether the bomb attacks on the two Iranian scientists were linked to their association with the organization.

The latest bombings came a day after leaked State Department documents quoted several Arab leaders as urging the United States to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. Iran says its nuclear program is for civilian purposes only, but many in the West and in Israel maintain that Tehran's aim is to build a nuclear bomb.

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