An member of Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard was killed outside his home in Tehran on Sunday by gunmen on a motorbike, state TV reported, giving only scant details about the attack.
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The two assailants shot the victim, Col. Hassan Sayyad Khodaei, five times as he entered his home in an alleyway in the eastern part of the capital, state media said.
Reports identified the target only as a "defender of the shrine," a reference to Iranians who fight against the extremist Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq within the Guard's elite Quds Force that oversees operations abroad.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.
Security forces were pursuing the suspected assailants, state TV reported, without offering further details or giving a motive for the killing.
The Guards blamed Sunday's killing on "anti-revolutionary" opponents of the Islamic government. The motorcycle attack was a reminder of the killings of Iranian nuclear scientists which Iran has often blamed on Israel.
According to various assessments, Khodaei was involved in Iranian plots to kidnap Israeli officials that was recently unearthed by Israeli security services. He also served as the right-hand man of Qassem Soleimani, the Quds Force chief who was assassinated by the Trump administration in 2020.
At least six Iranian scientists and academics have been killed or attacked since 2010, several of them by assailants riding motorcycles, in incidents believed to have targeted Iran's disputed nuclear program, which the West says is aimed at producing a bomb.
Iran denies this, saying its nuclear program has peaceful purposes and has denounced the killings of its scientists as acts of terrorism carried out by Western intelligence agencies and the Israeli Mossad. Israel has declined to comment on such accusations.
Meanwhile, Iran's semi-official ISNA news agency reported on Sunday that members of an Israeli intelligence service network had been discovered and arrested by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
"Under the guidance of the Zionist regime's intelligence service, the network attempted to steal and destroy personal and public property, kidnapping and obtaining fabricated confessions through a network of thugs," the IRGC public relations service said in a statement.
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