Iran will soon put on trial what it said were three Mossad-linked agents who were arrested in April, Iranian state news agency IRNA quoted a judiciary official as saying on Monday, as tensions between arch-foes Iran and Israel are on the increase.
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"The three were planning to assassinate our nuclear scientists according to intelligence assessments," Mehdi Shamsabadi said, without specifying the nationality of the detainees.
IRNA reported in April the arrest of three people it said were spies linked to the Israeli intelligence agency in Iran's southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan.
It's unclear why the three would have been in Sistan and Baluchistan, which has no nuclear sites. The restive province that borders Afghanistan and Pakistan faces sporadic attacks from armed insurgent groups.
Meanwhile, news outlets affiliated with the Iranian opposition reported that a senior engineer in the Iranian defense industry was shot and killed overnight Monday near the capital, Tehran. According to the report, assassins shot the engineer and two of his aides and managed to flee the scene. The report has not been corroborated by any other news outlet, nor have photographs or any other form of documentation of the alleged scene been published, as has normally been the case following similar incidents in the past.
In the midst of a wave of assassinations targeting its nuclear scientists and engineers, a senior Iranian official admitted for the first time on Monday that a mysterious blast at the nuclear facility in Parchin on May 25, which left two dead and several wounded, was the result of "industrial sabotage."
Hassani Ahangar, head of the Imam Khomenei University, which serves Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps cadets, told the semi-official Entekhab news agency that "The martyr from the Ministry of Defense was himself not the target but was affected by an act of industrial sabotage. We must prevent such threats with artificial intelligence methods."
Ahangar did not name the entity he believed to be responsible for the alleged sabotage.
Satellite images taken after the blast at Parchin at the end of May showed significant damage to the facility, which houses several industrial and research units. Western security services believe Iran carried out tests related to nuclear bomb detonations more than a decade ago.
In the summer of 2020, another unexplained blast struck the Parchin facility and sent a fireball into the sky that was visible from Tehran, which also felt the shockwaves.
"Engineer Ehsan Ghadbeigi was martyred and one of his colleagues was injured in an accident that took place in one of the Ministry of Defense's research units at the Parchin area on May 25 [2021]," Entekhab added.
Ghadbeigi was one of several scientists involved in Iran's nuclear and aerospace programs to die in apparent accidents in the past few months.
Also on Monday, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran is escalating its uranium enrichment further by preparing to use advanced IR-6 centrifuges at its underground Fordo site that can more easily switch between enrichment levels.
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