Israeli strikes that killed 9 Iranian scientists follows decade-long Mossad success of targeting Tehrans top nuclear minds

The pre-emptive Israeli strike that reportedly killed nine of Iran’s lead nuclear scientists Friday isn’t the first time Tel Aviv has successfully targeted Tehran’s top experts.Israel launched large-scale airstrikes against Iran on Friday, effectively assassinating some of the Islamic Republic’s top military and scientific leaders, saying it had “no choice” in light of Iran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program and slow-moving talks between Tehran and the US.Since 2010, the Mossad – the cunning Israeli intelligence agency – has been linked to the precision killings of at least four other Iranian scientists.The most notorious was the 2020 assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh — a physics professor regarded by Israel and Western officials as the father of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.Mossad masterminded the killing from outside Iran, through an AI machine gun mounted on a nearby truck.The device zoomed in on Fakhrizadeh’s face and fired 13 times as he was driving by, killing him in under a minute, while his wife — sitting mere inches away — was untouched.The attack succeeded despite Fakhrizadeh traveling with a security detail of as large as 11 men.Before that, a series of targeted killings in the early 2000s followed similar patterns, with Mossad taking aim at the scientists on their way to work.In 2010, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, an Iranian nuclear physicist who lectured at Tehran university, was killed when a bomb strapped to a motorcycle was triggered by remote control outside his home in northern Tehran as he was leaving.Later that year, another nuclear scientist, Professor Majid Shahriari was killed in the capital when men on motorcycles rode up alongside him and attached a bomb to his car.Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the 32-year-old deputy head of Iran’s uranium enrichment facility was killed in 2012 in a scenario that mimicked a Hollywood script — when two assassins on a motorbike attached a magnetic bomb to his Peugeot as he rode to wo...