Iranian scientist widely seen by Western intelligence as mastermind behind Iran’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Prominent Iranian military scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, killed in an attack outside Tehran on Friday, was widely seen by Western intelligence as the mastermind of clandestine Iranian efforts to develop nuclear weapons.
Iran denies Fakhrizadeh was involved in any such undertaking and that it ever tried to weaponise uranium enrichment for nuclear energy. But he is widely thought to have headed what the United Nations atomic watchdog and United States intelligence services believe was a coordinated nuclear arms programme that was halted in 2003.
What is known about him?
Western officials and experts believe Fakhrizadeh played a pivotal role in past Iranian work to devise the means to assemble a nuclear warhead behind the facade of a declared civilian uranium enrichment programme. Iran denies ever having sought to develop a nuclear weapon.
He lived in the shadows under high security and was never made available to UN nuclear investigators.Fakhrizadeh rarely – if ever – surfaced in public and few outside Iran know with any certainty what he looked like, let alone had met him. He has the rare distinction of being the only Iranian scientist named in the International Atomic Energy Agency’s 2015 “final assessment” of open questions about Iran’s nuclear programme and whether it was aimed at developing a bomb.
The UN non-proliferation watchdog’s report said he oversaw activities “in support of a possible military dimension to [Iran’s] nuclear programme” within the so-called AMAD Plan.A 2011 IAEA report described him as the AMAD Plan’s “Executive Officer”, a central figure in suspected Iranian work to develop technology and skills needed for atomic bombs, and suggested he may still have a role in such activity.
Israel has also described the AMAD Plan as Iran’s covert nuclear weapons programme, and says it seized a large chunk of an Iranian nuclear “archive” detailing its work.
In an April 2018 televised presentation about the archive, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu named Fakhrizadeh as a leading figure in what he described as secret nuclear weapons work conducted under the guise of a civilian programme.
Source: aljazeera.com
