Iran blames Israel, West for scientist murder

Tehran : Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has accused Israel and the Western governments of being behind the killing of a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist.

Unknown assailants on motorcycles attached bombs to the cars of two nuclear scientists as they were driving to work in Tehran on Monday, killing one and wounding the other, Iranian officials said Tuesday.

Ahmadinejad said that ?undoubtedly the hand of the Zionist regime and Western governments is involved” in the killing. But the murder would not cow down Iran from pursuing its nuclear ambitions.

The attacks have once again fanned the accusations that the United States and Israel were trying to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.

The motorcycle attackers attached the bombs to the cars, then drove off, detonating them from a distance, according to Iranian news media reports. The wife of one of the scientists was also hurt, reports said.

The slain scientist, Majid Shahriari, was managing a “major project” for the country’s Atomic Energy Organization, Iran’s nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, was quoted as saying.

Shahriari 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.

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.

A report from Washington said US State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley 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.

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.