AEOI Chief: Assassinations Unable to Impede Iran’s Progress
Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Fereidoun Abbasi underlined the country’s progress in different fields despite the various plots staged by the enemies, including the continued assassination of Iranian elites since the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Addressing a ceremony in the Western city of Hamedan to mark martyrdom anniversary of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the young Iranian nuclear scientist who was assassinated by Israeli agents last year, Abbasi pointed to the 17,000 terror victims assassinated since the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, and said “4,000 of them have been assassinated in Tehran alone”.
“But they (enemies) failed to undermine the revolutionary will of the Iranian people because people continued their path more vigilantly and persistently in compliance with their Leader,” he added.
The Iranian nuclear chief added that the country has achieved great progress in medical fields, including medical and diagnosis affaires.
As regards Iran’s peaceful nuclear achievements, Abbasi said that “when a country acquires nuclear science, it must have gone beyond the boundaries of a series of basic sciences”, meaning that “despite sanctions, we are self-sufficient in discovery, extraction, exploitation and production processes and we do not need foreign help”.
Reminding Iran’s home-grown and continued progress as well as the country’s self-sufficiency in nuclear grounds, the AEOI chief said, “Iran had made good progress in designing and building reactors, heavy-water production in Iran’s Central city of Arak has come into full operation, the complete fuel-loading (into nuclear reactors) and production cycle and other nuclear programs in the country are all done through domestically developed knowledge.”
On January 11, 2012, Ahmadi Roshan, a 32-year-old Iranian scientist, and his driver were both killed in the fifth attack of its kind in two years.
The blast took place on the second anniversary of the martyrdom of Iranian university professor and nuclear scientist, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, who was also assassinated in a terrorist bomb attack in Tehran in January 2010.
The assassination method used in the bombing was similar to the 2010 terrorist bomb attacks against the then university professor, Fereidoun Abbassi Davani – who is now the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization – and his colleague Majid Shahriari. While Abbasi Davani survived the attack, Shahriari was martyred.
Another Iranian scientist, Dariush Rezaeinejad, was also assassinated through the same method on 23 July 2011.
Political observers believe that the West has remained at loggerheads with Iran mainly over the independent and home-grown nature of Tehran’s nuclear technology, which gives the Islamic Republic the potential to turn into a world power and a role model for the other third-world countries. Washington has laid much pressure on Iran to make it give up the most sensitive and advanced part of the technology, which is uranium enrichment, a process used for producing nuclear fuel for power plants.
Iran has so far ruled out halting or limiting its nuclear work in exchange for trade and other incentives, saying that renouncing its rights under the NPT would encourage the world powers to put further pressure on the country and would not lead to a change in the West’s hardline stance on Tehran.
