Iranian nuclear physicist killed by Revolutionary Guard, not Israel, relative claims

Sister of slain scientist says Iran killed him because he would not agree to help weaponize peaceful nuclear activities.

A policeman walks past the car belonging to Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan at a blast site outside a university in northern Tehran January 11, 2012. Photo By: REUTERS

The sister of a leading Iranian nuclear physicist widely believed to have been assassinated by Israel as part of an effort to derail the Islamic Republic’s drive to create nuclear weapons says her brother was murdered by Iran ’s Revolutionary Guard (IRI) because he wouldn’t cooperate with the effort to divert nuclear activities from peaceful purposes.

When Iranian scientist Dr. Ardeshir Hosseinpour was killed in February 2007, the cause of death was reported to be “gassing” and most presumed the act was carried out by Israel . That belief stood, largely because of Iranian accusations to that effect; and because of Israeli policy to neither confirm nor deny such acts. But now, seven years later, Mahboobeh Hosseinpour has come forward with the claim that the IRI was behind her brother’s death because of his refusal to be involved in Iran ’s nuclear enrichment program whose use was for atomic purposes.

If Hosseinpour’s account can be confirmed, it could have an impact on the next round of talks between Iran and the P5+1 — the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany.

Speaking to The Media Line from Turkey via Skype in a conversation arranged by the Iranian opposition group The New Iran, 52-year old Mahboobeh Hosseinpour said that she learned through her sister-in-law, Sara Araghi, of her brother’s secret research, and particularly about a DVD which contained research and formulas for building an atomic bomb 12 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb and methods for neutralizing it.

Mahmoobeh Hosseinpour learned that her brother was contacted in November 2004 by three special agents of IRI’s Defense Department with a personal message from IRI’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, enlisting him to work on increasing IRI’s uranium enrichment capabilities for the purpose of building atomic weapons; and with a secondary goal of teaching and supervising Russian and North Korean scientists in order to accelerate the project. Speaking about her brother, Hosseinpour said that “he was offered a two star rank in the Revolutionary Guard and ownership of factories,” if he agreed.

Read more: Iranian nuclear physicist killed by Revolutionary Guard, not Israel, relative claims

Op-Ed: The Men Who Enjoy Killing Jews

[ Like Eichmann, they don’t murder Jews for their money. ]

Eichmann’s passport, used to flee to Argentina

There is no greater temptation than explaining a mass murderer through his childhood’s ghosts. Palestinian terrorists slit the throats of the Fogels till the last baby they find? It is because of the checkpoints around Nablus. Mohammed Deif built the tunnels of death in southern Israel? It is because of the “occupation”.

Of Adolf Eichmann it has been said that he was an unhappy child, an unfriendly and lonely student, a sexually inhibited boy frustrated by the financial crisis of his father. For fifty years, since Colonel Eichmann was hanged by the Israelis and his ashes scattered in the Mediterranean, the architect of the Holocaust has been portrayed as a gray bureaucrat, an ordinary human being, a faceless wheel of a larger project, driven by cowardice, desire for social advancement and bourgeois moral myopia.

Now a book by the German scholar Bettina Stangneth, “Eichmann Before Jerusalem”, tells us the truth.

“If 10.3 million of these enemies had been killed – Eichmann said of the Jews – then we would have fulfilled our duty. We could have said: ‘We destroyed an enemy’”.

This is not the same Eichmann who is “incapable of thinking” in Hannah Arendt’s words.

“We could have done more”, Eichmann went on to say after the war. “I was an idealist, I was part of the thinking process”.

Bettina Stangneth discovered a letter of 1956 where Eichmann asked then Chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, to return to his fatherland claiming do deserve it because of what he did to the Jews. We have two images of Adolf Eichmann. The first, dating back to 1942, has been reproduced millions of times. The Chief of the Jewish Affairs office at the Gestapo has the cap and the dead head of the SS, he looks arrogant, haughty, his smile looks more like a sneer. Twenty years later, Eichmann is a man without a face, accommodating and condescending, sitting behind the crystal slabs. Eichmann here resembled those Indian fakirs covered with ashes, sitting along the banks of the Ganges at Benares. During the war, while the extermination factories accumulated his Jewish victims, Eichmann collected media clippings on his “performance”. He directed the deportations of all Jewish children from France. One of his directives was a sentence of death to the French Jews: “If you want to solve once and for all the Jewish problem for no reason we must withdraw from the line previously established in areas occupied by the Italians”.

Read more: Op-Ed: The Men Who Enjoy Killing Jews