A missile engineer serving in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was killed last week in an apparent assassination, Channel 12 News cited Iranian state media as confirming on Sunday.
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The report noted that according to Iranian social media posts, Said Thamardar Mutlak was murdered in the southcentral Iranian city of Shiraz last week. Mainstream and social media referred to him as a "shahid" ("martyr") – an elevation usually reserved in Iran for those who are killed in the line of duty.
He was buried in the "martyrs plot" in a Shiraz cemetery, Iranian media said.
According to Channel 12 News, several social media posts alleged that state-run Iranian media had been instructed to downplay Mutlak's death and that his family had been warned by authorities not to share the news of his assassination.
Iranian opposition officials alleged that Israel's Mossad intelligence agency was behind the assassination given that Mutlak was "a senior engineer in the IRGC's missile program."
The past few months have seen Iran plagued by a series of mysterious mishaps in key nuclear sites, compounded further by the assassination of key IRGC personnel, high-ranking officials, and nuclear scientists.
Tehran has blamed Israel – long suspected of killing Iranian nuclear scientists over the last decade – for all of these incidents. While the shadow war between the Islamic republic and the Jewish state has become far more public in recent years, Israel has remained mum on the issue.
The recent elimination of top IRGC officials has put Tehran on edge. An Iranian official told The Financial Times last week that "It feels as if Israel has established a large-scale organization in Tehran and freely runs its operations. Israel is clearly targeting Iran's 'highly secure' image to tarnish its greatness in people's eyes."
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