Iranian nuclear physicist shot dead
A pair of gunmen firing from motorcycles killed an Iranian physicist involved in the country's disputed nuclear programme today in an attack similar to other recent assassinations of scientists which Tehran has blamed on the US and Israel.
The killing is sure to add to tension with the West, as Iran moves ahead with an atomic programme that four rounds of UN sanctions have failed to slow.
The target, identified in Iranian media reports as 35-year-old Darioush Rezaei, was a physics professor whose area of expertise was neutron transport, which lies at the heart of nuclear chain reactions in reactors and bombs. One of the earlier assassinations, in November, killed a man with the same specialisation.
Several news reports, including by the semi-official ISNA news agency, linked him to the country's nuclear programme.
The US and Israel and some of their allies accuse Iran of seeking to develop a nuclear weapons capability under the cover of its civilian atomic energy programme. Iran's missile programme and its launch of satellites has raised fears it is also marching toward a capability to deliver a nuclear warhead across continents.
Iran denies the accusations and says its atomic programme has entirely peaceful aims.
Two attackers on motorbikes approached Mr Rezaei's car as he was driving up to his home in north-eastern Tehran with his wife and young daughter, said the news website asriran.com.
The gunmen called his name and shot him in the neck as he turned around, state-run Press TV reported, quoting witnesses.
His wife was injured in the attack and rushed to a hospital for treatment, said the semi-official Mehr news agency, quoting a police official.
The governor of Tehran, Morteza Tamaddon, said intelligence and security agencies have begun an investigation but no-one has been arrested, the official IRNA news agency reported.
Despite the UN and other sanctions, Iran has steadily moved ahead with its uranium enrichment work, the central aspect of its nuclear programme and the process that is of deepest concern to the West because it can be used both to produce reactor fuel and material for nuclear warheads.
Iran insists it is only after reactor fuel, but the UN's nuclear watchdog agency has accused Iran of stalling its investigation into the work for years.
In November, a pair of back-to-back bomb attacks in different parts of the capital killed one nuclear scientist and wounded another. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blamed the US and Israel.
In those attacks, assailants on motorcycles attached magnetised bombs to the cars of two scientists as they drove to work. They detonated seconds later.
The man who survived that attack, Fereidoun Abbasi, is on a list of figures suspected of links to secret nuclear activities in a 2007 UN sanctions resolution, which put a travel ban and asset freeze on those listed.
Mr Abbasi has since been named one of Iran's vice presidents and head of its nuclear agency.
The scientist killed in that attack had the same area of expertise as Mr Rezaei.
At least two other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in recent years.
As well as the attacks on scientists, Iran has faced other setbacks in its nuclear work which it said were the result of foreign plots, including a mysterious computer worm that forced a temporary shutdown of Iran's main enrichment plant in the central town of Natanz last year.
Iran's foreign minister said earlier this month that his country was ready to co-operate more closely with the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency but only if it ends its investigation into allegations that Tehran has secretly worked on a nuclear weapons programme - a condition rejected by the head of the UN nuclear watchdog.
Iran argues it has co-operated and answered all questions mandated by the plan governing the agency's probe.
