Qualla: Mohsen Fakhrizadeh

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh: Introduction

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On a Friday afternoon in November 2020, a blue Nissan pickup truck sat parked on a rural road near Absard, a small town in the hills east of Tehran. Inside it was no driver -- only a machine gun mounted on a robotic platform, controlled by satellite from over a thousand kilometers away. When the convoy of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh passed, the weapon fired thirteen rounds in less than a minute. The physicist who had spent decades as the most guarded secret in Iran's nuclear program was dead before his bodyguards could react.

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Mohsen Fakhrizadeh: The Physicist in the Shadows

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was born in Qom on March 21, 1961. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, he joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and pursued physics at Shahid Beheshti University, eventually earning a PhD from the Isfahan University of Technology. By 1991, he was teach...

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Mohsen Fakhrizadeh: A Machine That Pulled the Trigger

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The assassination on November 27, 2020, in Absard was unlike any targeted killing before it. According to reports attributed to Israeli and Iranian sources, the weapon was a Belgian-made FN MAG machine gun mounted inside the bed of a parked Nissan pickup. The gun was operated rem...

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Mohsen Fakhrizadeh: Decades of Shadow War

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Fakhrizadeh's killing was not an isolated event but the culmination of a long covert campaign. Between 2010 and 2012, four other Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated in Tehran, typically by assailants on motorcycles who attached magnetic bombs to their cars. Fakhrizadeh s...

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Mohsen Fakhrizadeh: The Road to Absard

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Absard sits in the Damavand region east of Tehran, a hillside retreat where Tehran's elite maintain weekend homes. The road where Fakhrizadeh died runs through quiet farmland at the edge of town. After the assassination, Iran's parliament passed legislation accelerating uranium e...

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