TEHRAN An Iranian nuclear scientist was killed by a bomb placed on his car by a motorcyclist in Tehran on Wednesday, and a city official has blamed Israel for the attack. The attack in Tehran strongly resembles earlier killings of scientists working on the country's controversial nuclear program. Iran's Atomic Energy Organization called the killing "a heinous act," adding in a statement quoted on Iranian television, "We will continue our (nuclear) path without any doubt ... Our path is irreversible." The state-controlled Fars news agency identified the victim as Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, a 32-year-old graduate of the prestigious Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. Describing the assassination as a terrorist attack, Fars said Roshan had supervised a department at Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment facility and was also a professor at Tehrans technical university. Roshan was inside an Iranian-assembled Peugeot 405 car together with two others when the bomb exploded near Gol Nabi Street in north Tehran, Fars reported. Fars said the two other passengers had been wounded, but Reuters reported witnesses saying one pedestrian was also killed, and another person in the car was gravely injured.
Iranian officials were quick to pin the attack on Israel.
"The bomb was a magnetic one and the same as the ones previously used for the assassination of the scientists, and the work of the Zionists (Israelis)," Fars quoted Tehran Deputy Governor Safarali Baratloo as saying.
Roshan was a chemistry expert who was involved in building polymeric layers for gas separation, the use of various membranes to isolate gases. He was also a deputy director of the Natanz uranium enrichment plant. According to a conservative news website mashreghnews.ir, Roshan was in charge of purchasing and supplying equipment for the Natanz facility.
Two daylight bomb attacks in Tehran in November 2010 killed one nuclear scientist and wounded another. Iran blamed Israeli, British and U.S. intelligence for those attacks, which it said were aimed at assassinating key people working on Iran's nuclear program.
Iran denies Western suspicions that its nuclear program has military goals, saying it is for purely peaceful purposes.
There was no immediate word from Israeli officials. Israel has always declined comment on previous such bombings in Iran.
On Tuesday, Israel Defense Forces Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz was quoted as saying that Iran should expect more "unnatural" events in 2012. His comments, to a closed Knesset panel in Jerusalem, were widely interpreted as alluding to previous acts of sabotage.
"For Iran, 2012 is a critical year in combining the continuation of its nuclearization, internal changes in the Iranian leadership, continuing and growing pressure from the international community and things which take place in an unnatural manner," Gantz was quoted as saying.
Several diplomats and analyists issued statements following the blast.
"I presume that the mission is just simply to make life a bit more difficult, to make people a bit more reluctant to be part of the nuclear program," said a European diplomat in Vienna. "I don't see it as something that logically can stop the program."
Mark Fitzpatrick, director at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said, "Even if the death was part of a campaign to set back Iran's nuclear ambitions by targeting top scientists, it wouldn't be in direct response to the Fordow announcement. Such operations have to be well-planned in advance. The timing is most likely coincidental."
Mark Hibbs, at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said, "That this victim was a scientist in Iran's enrichment program is unconfirmed, but if so it would appear that outside efforts to target Iran's nuclear personnel are continuing unabated. Whoever is doing this has to have serious intelligence assets on the ground in Iran, and it would appear from these repeated attacks on installations and people that the perpetrators have these."