TEHRAN — An
Iranian Revolutionary Guards colonel was shot dead outside his Tehran home on
Sunday, the Guards said, blaming his “assassination” on assailants linked to
the US and its allies.
اضافة اعلان
The killing of
Colonel Sayyad Khodai is the most high profile murder announced by Iran since
the 2020 killing of top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
Iran had accused
Israel of masterminding the attack on
Fakhrizadeh’s convoy near Tehran.
On Sunday,
Iran’s
Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said that “elements linked to global
arrogance” — a reference to the US and its allies, including Israel — were
responsible for the “terrorist act” that claimed Khodai’s life.
In a statement
posted on their website, the Guards said Khodai “was assassinated in an armed
attack carried out by two motorcyclists on Mojahedin-e Eslam street in Tehran”,
outside his home.
The Guards — the
ideological arm of Iran’s military — described Khodai as a “defender of the
sanctuary”, a term used for anyone who works on behalf of the Islamic republic
in Syria or Iraq.
Iran wields
considerable influence in Iraq, home to key
Shiite holy shrines, where it says
it has “military advisors” tasked with training foreign “volunteers”.
The Islamic
republic is also a major ally of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad and has
backed his government in that country’s 11-year civil war. Tehran says it has
deployed forces in Syria at the invitation of Damascus, but only as advisors.
State television
said that Khodai was “well-known” in
Syria, without elaborating.
Five bullets
The official news agency
IRNA said Khodai was killed by five bullets as he returned home at around 4pm
(1130 GMT).
The agency published pictures showing a man slumped
over in the driver’s seat of a white car, with blood around the collar of his
blue shirt and on his right upper arm.
He is strapped in with his seat belt and the front
window on the passenger side has been shot out.
The Guards said they launched an investigation to
identify the “aggressor or aggressors”.
The Fars news agency reported that the state
prosecutor visited the scene of the killing and ordered the “quick
identification and arrest of the authors of this criminal act”.
Khodai’s killing came as Iran and world powers have
been negotiating a deal to restore a 2015 nuclear pact.
The 2015 agreement gave Iran sanctions relief in
exchange for curbs on its nuclear program to prevent Tehran from developing an
atomic bomb — something it has always denied wanting to do.
But the
US unilaterally withdrew from the accord in
2018 under then-president Donald Trump and re-imposed biting economic
sanctions, prompting Iran to begin rolling back on its own commitments.
The negotiations, aimed at bringing the US back into
the deal and Iran to full compliance with it, have stalled for about two
months.
One of the main stumbling block is
Tehran’s demand to remove
the Guards from a US terrorism list — a request rejected by Washington.
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