ISRAEL LINK TO SUDDEN DEATH OF IRAN NUKE SCIENTIST

The Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, is being linked to the sudden death by gas poisoning of one of Iran’s top nuclear scientists, Professor Adashir Hosseinpour, 44.
His death on January 18 was a state secret in Iran for almost a week. He is believed to have worked as a physicist at the Isfahan facility which the Israelis say produces a gas used for enriching uranium in the nuclear plant at Natanz. Iranian authorities only admitted to news agencies that he had died of gas poisoning and refused say exactly how or where he met his end. The lack of information about his passing, coupled with official silence for almost a week, raised suspicions in the intelligence world. Prof. Hosseinpour was no ordinary scientist, having been awarded major prizes for his work, including one military research in 2004.
The Mossad link was first made by Stratfor, a US global security company with close links to the CIA, and was quickly reported in leading Israeli newspapers, including the Jerusalem Post. Stratfor claimed its sources within Israeli intelligence confirmed that Prof. Hosseinpour had been on as Mossad assassination list for some time and the Israelis finally got their man. A Mossad connection was also contained in claims on an Iranian expatriates’ website that not one scientist but several who worked on Iran’s nuclear energy programs were recently assassinated by Mossad agents.
While Mossad will make no comment, it is known that it likes its dirty work to be known to its enemies in order to induce fear in them. It would therefore not be outside the realms of possibility that it leaked its role in this death to instill dread in the minds of Iranian scientists and others, possibly from the former Soviet Union, who might be tempted by large sums of money to work in Iran’s nuclear industry.
If Mossad killed Hosseinpour, his death fits a pattern of similar assassinations of scientists carried out by the Israelis over several decades. During Saddam’s efforts to develop a nuclear industry in the late 1970s-80s, every effort was made by Mossad to kill off scientists essential to the construction of a nuclear reactor. On June 14, 1980, Yahia El Meshad, an Egyptian physicist in charge of Iraq’s Atomic Energy Agency was beaten to death in a room at the Meridien Hotel in Paris. He was on loan to Iraq, as a result of an agreement with the Soviet Union and was the link between the French and the Iraqis. At that time, the French were providing parts and expertise for the construction of an Osiris nuclear reactor 17 miles south west of Baghdad. El Meshad was in Paris for a brief visit to study nuclear safety. The only eyewitness to his murder was a female who died mysteriously less than two months later. She was observed getting into a dispute with an unknown man on a major Paris thoroughfare. He struck her and when she fell to the ground a car ran over her, killing her instantly. No one was found responsible for either death but the French told Saddam they believed Mossad had murdered El Meshad. The Osiris reactor, which the French donated to Saddam and which Al Meshad was working on, was destroyed in an Israeli bombing raid a year later in 1981.
Perhaps the most striking example of Mossad’s willingness to assassinate scientists was the clinical execution on March 20, 1990 of Gerard Bull, the brilliant Canadian-born scientist. Bull was a renowned expert in designing artillery pieces and had dreams of building a super gun capable of sending satellites into orbits or firing missiles into the outer atmosphere to reach targets at a distance of 1,000 miles. His research caught the attention of the Canadian and US governments and both employed him. The US even awarded him citizenship.
But by the 1970s he had cut his links to the Pentagon and set up his own company, The Space Research Foundation to sell his artillery designs to foreign powers. In 1980 he served a year in prison in the US for violating an arms embargo on S. Africa. Afterwards, he told friends he was angry with America. He renounced his US citizenship and moved his business operations to Belgium and Austria. According to him, the CIA had given him the go-ahead to supply the apartheid regime in S. Africa with weapons and expertise and had then abandoned him when his operations were made public.
At the start of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein send a private jet to Belgium to pick up Bull and that was the beginning of a business partnership. At the outset, Bull designed two types of artillery pieces that could deliver shells, many of them filled with deadly chemicals, further than any western-designed howitzers. He also created self-propelled artillery delivery systems which were, like his other creations, used against Iranian mass formations of infantry. His work for Iraq did not worry the US or Britain because they were on the same side. They supported Iraq against the Islamist Iranian regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. There is now evidence that the US and Britain not only provided Iraq with chemicals for its chemical weapons but also with hard intelligence on its enemy. In fact, a US AWACs surveillance plane operating out of Saudi Arabia constantly offered up-to-the minute intelligence to the Saudis on the movements of troops on the Iranian front lines. The Saudis with approval from the US passed that on to Iraqi commanders, many of whom were using Bull’s artillery pieces.
While Gerald Bull felt safe in working with the Iraqis, he was unaware he was constantly under scrutiny by the Israelis. Unlike the US, they supported all sides in the Iran-Iran conflict, including arming Iraqi Kurds to attack Saddam’s forces in the north of the country. The Israelis were especially keen to see that Iran did not lose the war. To that end, they armed the Iranians and eventually persuaded the Reagan administration to supply the Islamists in Iran with weapons in return for American hostages held by Hezbollah in Beirut. That deal collapsed and the only beneficiaries were Iran and its ally, Israel.
When the war ended in a stalemate, Bull advised Saddam that if Iraq was to be a big player on the international stage, it had to update its Scud missiles, so they could be fired greater distances. It also had to be able to launch rockets into space. Saddam commissioned him to update his Scuds and to build an artillery piece with the codename, Project Babylon. It was to be Bull’s dream of a super gun – the PC2. It was 150 meters long, with a bore of 39 inches wide. It weighed 2,100 tons and was capable of firing a 2,000 kilogram rocket into orbit.
The moment Bull produced a test version of the gun and fired it, Mossad began planning to assassinate him. In March 1990, a year before the final version of the gun was ready to go into service, a Mossad team shadowed him in Brussels. On the evening of March 22, 1990 Bull was returning to his Brussels apartment when an assassin walked behind him and with a silenced pistol fired three bullets into him. As Bull, lay dying the killer bent over him and shot him twice in the back of the head. At the time of his death, he had $20,000 in his possession but it was left on the body. However, a pendant Bull wore was removed as a trophy. Belgian investigators later confirmed a well known Mossad hit man was subsequently seen wearing the pendant. Reports soon surfaced that Bull had been in contact with the CIA during his work for Iraq and that the agency turned a blind eye when it learned about Mossad’s plan to kill him. Not long after his death, the British authorities confiscated parts intended for the manufacture of the big gun and the project was abandoned.
The mystery surrounding Bull’s murder was publicly resolved less than a decade later when a Mossad chief admitted his agency killed the scientist. In making the admission, the Mossad figure offered a justification for the killing which may well have relevance to the resent death of Prof. Hosseinpour. He said:
“Whoever volunteers to destroy us, or to serve those who have sworn to destroy us, should know in advance that we will be after him wherever he goes, wherever he runs to. I hope the message had an echo, and the echo got far enough to warn others.”
In light of that statement, one could reasonably conclude that Mossad deliberately leaked the news that it assassinated Prof. Hosseinpour in order to send a message to others working for Iraq’s nuclear program that they too would be murdered if they did not abandon their work.