Mohsen Fakhrizadeh

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh Mahabadi (Persian: محسن فخری‌زاده مهابادی Fa-Kh-Ree-Zadeh; 1958 – 27 November 2020) was an Iranian nuclear physicist and scientist. He was regarded as the chief of Iran's nuclear program.

Born in Qom in 1958, Fakhrizadeh joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps after the Iranian revolution of 1979. He attended Shahid Beheshti University and later received a PhD from the University of Isfahan. Beginning in 1991, he was a physics professor at Imam Hossein University.

Fakhrizadeh led the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research and the Green Salt Project. Due to Fakhrizadeh's affiliation with the Iranian nuclear program, both the United Nations Security Council and the United States ordered his assets frozen in the mid-2000s. In the early 2010s, he established and led the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, which, according to the United States, conducted research potentially useful for nuclear weapons. Iran has denied that its nuclear programme has a military aspect. In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Fakhrizadeh was the head of the AMAD Project. Following his death, the Iranian government said that in 2020, he helped develop COVID-19 testing kits and a vaccine for use during the pandemic.

On 27 November 2020, the Israeli government assassinated Fakhrizadeh in a road ambush in Absard using an autonomous satellite-operated gun. In a June 2021 television interview, former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen offered Israel's closest admission yet of its responsibility for the assassination. The Iranian government labelled the killing of the scientist an act of "state terror." The killing raised tensions in the region and the Iranian legislature passed a bill to block inspections of its nuclear program.