Tuesday, 01 December 2020_Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf says Iran reserves the right to legitimate defense against organized terrorist acts, and thus it will pursue “definitive punishment” of those behind the assassination of a prominent nuclear scientist.
He made the remarks in separate messages sent on Monday to the UN chief, the Islamic Inter-Parliamentary Union secretary general and some parliament speakers.
Qalibaf said the assassination on Friday of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s deputy defense minister and head of the ministry’s Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND), near Tehran was an “organized act of terrorism.”
Preliminary evidence suggests that those who ordered the inhumane crime “have a long history of targeted extraterritorial assassinations in the sensitive West Asia region and beyond,” Qalibaf said.
Iran’s Parliament, he added, “considers this criminal and felonious act to be a clear example of organized terrorism, in obvious contradiction and flagrant violation of the principle of national sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and strongly condemns it.”