“Hasan Sayyad Khodai, a shrine defender, was killed in an armed attack by two motorcyclists on Mohahedin-e Eslam street in Tehran”, the Guardians said in the statement.
The term “sanctuary defender” designates anyone who works on behalf of the Islamic Republic in Syria and Iraq, countries that host Shiite worship sites and where Iran has a presence.
The Guardians of the Revolution stated that the victim was a colonel and they denounced a “terrorist act” committed by “elements linked to world arrogance” (The United States and its allies, according to the official terminology of the Islamic Republic).
An investigation has been opened to identify “the aggressor or aggressors”, the Guardians added in their statement.
The Irna agency published photos showing a man covered in blood, in the driver’s seat of a vehicle with broken windows.” The colonel was on his way home when he was hit by gunfire at around 4:00 p.m. (11:30 a.m. GMT). ), according to Irna.
The Tasnim agency, meanwhile, stated that Khodai was “close to home” when he was killed. “His wife was the first person to see the body,” the Tasnim agency said.
Iran claims to be present in Syria and Iraq through what it calls “military advisers.”
State television specified without giving further details that Colonel Khodai was “known in Syria”, a country at war since 2011.
The spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Said Khatibzadeh, condemned the “silence of the countries that intend to fight against terrorism.”
The Fars press agency indicated that Iran’s prosecutor “appeared in person at the scene” of the events, and ordered “speed up the identification and arrest of the perpetrators of this criminal act.”
This same day, the Guardians had announced the arrest of a “network of bandits linked to the intelligence service of the Zionist regime” (Israel).
The network is involved in “robbery, damage to private and public property, kidnapping and obtaining false confessions,” the Guardians charged.
Colonel Khodai is the most important figure to be killed on Iranian soil since nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed in November 2020 near the capital in an attack on his motorcade.
Fakhrizadeh was introduced after his death as a deputy defense minister and head of the Defense Research and Innovation Organization (Sepand), which contributed to the country’s “anti-atomic defense”.
Iran has been participating for more than a year in negotiations with several world powers to relaunch an international agreement signed in 2015 that sought to limit the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programbut from which the United States unilaterally withdrew in 2018.
The negotiations have been stalled for two months, when it seemed that an agreement was close to being reached.
One of the obstacles is the Iranian demand that the United States remove the Revolutionary Guards from the US blacklist of “foreign terrorist organizations.”
Source: Ambito
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