No hit man was involved in the recent assassination of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council said.Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of burial of the late Iranian scientist on Monday, Ali Shamkhani said the distinguished figure was assassinated in a complicated operation that involved electronic equipment without any assassin at the scene.
Israel's Kan network correspondent Amichai Stein quotes the Iranian Fars news agency saying:
According to Fars - Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and his wife drove to their home in the suburbs of Tehran last Friday, accompanied by three security vehicles. In the middle of the trip, a remote control weapon opened fire, and Fakhrizadeh went out to check what had happened. Fakhrizadeh thought that it was his car that had actually collided with something. From the moment he left, he was shot at by an automatic machine gun that was on top of a nearby Nissan vehicle. After he was hit, the Nissan vehicle with the machine gun on it exploded.....The owner of the vehicle on which the machine-gun was installed left Iran on October 29.
If this report is true, it means that both the Nissan truck and the machine gun were remotely controlled.
Is that possible?
Israel does have plenty of experience with remote controlled and autonomous vehicles.
The Daily Mail reports that Israel designed a remotely controlled pickup truck with a machine gun:
The IDF showed off this technology in 2016, when it was fitted into Ford F-350 pickup trucks that were designed to conduct border patrols.The trucks, dubbed Border Protector Unmanned Ground Vehicles, are equipped with an array of sensors and cameras that allowed people to drive them remotely.At the time they were unveiled the trucks were unarmed, but the IDF said it was hoping to arm the vehicles some time in early 2017.'We will get a machine gun on the vehicle that will be operated from a control room,' an IDF official told Fox News at the time.The IDF said the vehicles have been operational since 2015, and would later incorporate driverless technology.
If this hit was really done remotely, it looks like the nation that sponsored the assassination - presumably Israel - built special equipment just for the occasion. The technology is easily within Israel's capabilities but hiding that weaponry on a standard pickup truck and running it remotely via satellite adds quite a bit of complexity. Smuggling such a weapon to Iran is almost as impressive as the technology.
I'm not sure why Tehran would lie about this, unless it is embarrassed that it couldn't find any shooters and is using this as a cover story. But to tell its own people that Israel was able to get such equipment into Iran and execute someone definitely makes any potential targets far more concerned about how easily they could get killed.
On the other hand, if Israel really decided to do the hit remotely, that is an enormous amount of trust in technology for eliminating such a target. Iranian claims that Fakhrizadeh went out of his car to check what happened and was then shot - and that he was in a bulletproof car - indicates that if he hadn't left is car he might still be alive, and it seems unlikely Israel would have taken such a chance. Also, the side of the car he was in shows that the small window in back was shattered, but one would expect the entire side of the car to be riddled with bullets if it was a machine gun, and there is no evidence of that.
One other point: an operation like this would take probably years from conception through building the specialized equipment and smuggling it into Iran to appropriate agents, along with long-term surveillance of Fakhrizadeh's habits (or inside information about them.) Iran may claim that their nuclear program is peaceful, but Israel wouldn't spend that much time and money on a unique method of assassinating someone unless it was very sure that the target was extraordinarily valuable. This much effort indicates that the assassination set back Iran's nuclear weapons program significantly.