Some of those involved in the assassination of Iran's top nuclear scientist last month have been arrested, an adviser to the Iranian parliament speaker said on Tuesday, according to the semi-official news agency ISNA.
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Iran has blamed Israel for the Nov. 27 killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was seen by Western intelligence services as the mastermind of a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Tehran has long denied any such ambition. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for the killing.
"The perpetrators of this assassination, some of whom have been identified and even arrested by the security services, will not escape justice," ISNA quoted adviser Hossein Amir-Abdollahian as telling Iran's Arabic-language Al Alam TV.
"Were the Zionists (Israel) able to do this alone and without the cooperation of, for example, the American [intelligence] service or another service? They certainly could not do that," Amir-Abdollahian said.
Iran has given contradictory details of Fakhrizadeh's death in a daytime Nov. 27 ambush on his car on a highway near the capital Tehran.
Meanwhile, officials from the United States' allies in Europe and the Gulf have warned of imminent Iranian attacks on Israeli or Jewish sites around the world in retaliation for Fakhrizadeh's assassination, according to a report in Business Insider.
"In the past year, agents linked to Israel and the US have killed Qasem Soleimani, the top commander of Iran's regional operations in the Middle East; Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, Iran's top ally in Iraq, multiple Iranian and allied Hezbollah commanders in Syria; Abu Mohammed al Masri, a top al-Qaida official believed to be living in Tehran; and, most recently, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the head of Iran's nuclear weapons program," the report noted.
While the United States took very clear responsibility for the drone strike which killed both Soleimani and al-Muhandis, which reportedly utilized Israeli intelligence, the Jewish state has not publicly admitted to its role in any of the other killings, except for the strikes against Iranian and Hezbollah commanders in Syria.
Hardliners within the Tehran regime are furious at the course of events and have demanded revenge against US or Israeli targets – preferably even both.
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One European diplomatic source said, "Iran has two conflicting policies in place: Patience in responding to Israeli provocations but also the national need to project the ability to deter such attacks."
Israel has placed its diplomatic missions around the world on high alert as the country's intelligence services assess that the likelihood of reprisals in the next few weeks is high.
Gulf states, particularly the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, with which Israel recently signed normalization agreements and which have already drawn thousands of business people and tourists are thought to be top Iranian targets.
i24NEWS contributed to this report.
