Motive for killing of Iranian professor unclear

THERE IS an element of mystery about yesterday’s murder of the physics professor at Tehran University, described as a nuclear scientist by the regime but as a supporter of the Green Movement by the opposition.

Instead of being a regime hardliner, Massoud Ali Mohammadi is believed to have harboured reformist sympathies.

He was among 420 Tehran University professors who signed a petition on June 9th, three days before last year’s presidential election, endorsing Mir-Hossein Moussavi, the reformist candidate and now the main opposition leader.

Reformist websites hinted that this fact – rather than his possible role in the nuclear programme – might lie behind his murder.

Kaleme, the official website of Mr Moussavi, linked the professor’s death to the killing of the opposition leader’s nephew, indirectly suggesting that the academic might have been killed as a way of placing more pressure on the regime’s critics.

“Following the suspicious assassination of . . . the nephew of Mr Moussavi [on December 27th] . . . the assassination of a committed professor of Tehran University” happened, said the website.

The bloggers were quick to suspect the murder was a plot by hardliners to scare ordinary people. Assassinations outside a victim’s house, using bombs or guns, would remind many Iranians of the insecure years after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Some news websites, including Ayandenews, which is a conservative website critical of the fundamentalist government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claimed that Mohammadi was not involved in the nuclear programme. Instead, he was simply a prominent physics professor with reformist inclinations.

The Atomic Energy Organisation said Prof Mohammadi was not among its employees. It is not clear, however, whether every expert working for the nuclear programme would also be an official in this body.

State television gave wide coverage to the “martyr” and showed the scene of the blast outside his home, which destroyed the door of the building in northern Tehran and shattered windows in neighbouring houses.

Mahmoud Ahmadi, a fundamentalist MP on the national security committee, linked the killing to the post-election crisis, telling state television that US and Israeli intelligence had “put physical elimination on their new agenda” as part of their alleged plot to cause domestic turmoil in Iran.

Fars news agency, close to the Revolutionary Guards, said the Iran Kingdom Association, a monarchist group, had claimed responsibility for the attack.

About a dozen members of the association are believed to be in jail, with at least four of them on death row for their alleged involvement in fuelling the post-election crisis.

Meanwhile, an official at Tehran’s governor-general office told ISNA, the student news agency, that the involvement of Mujahedin Khalgh Organisation, an armed opposition group of exiles that has a record of similar killings, was “one of the possibilities”.

Some members of the group are also in jail on charges of fomenting the recent crisis.

It was not immediately clear if the death of Mohammadi would lead to quicker execution of such defendants and more repression of the opposition.