Parliament speaker Ali Larijani,Iran's former chief nuclear negotiator,on Wednesday accused intelligence agents of the United States and Israel of plotting a bombing which killed a top atomic scientist. "We had received clear information a few days before (the assassination) that the (intelligence) service of the Zionist regime,with the cooperation of the CIA,were seeking to carry out a terrorist act in Tehran," the ISNA news agency quoted Larijani as saying. Massoud Ali Mohammadi,a particle physics professor at prestigious Tehran University,was killed yesterday morning by a bomb strapped to a motorcycle in the capital's well-to-do northern suburbs. "They (the Israeli and US intelligence agencies) might have thought that,in the face of certain internal disputes,there was an opportunity to take this action and that they could cause friction among academics and harm the country's nuclear research work," Larijani added. The slain scientist was not a stalwart of the Iranian government. His name appeared on a list of academics backing opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi in the disputed June 12 presidential election,which gave President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term. The opposition claims the vote was massively rigged in Ahmadinejad's favour. For the past six months,it has been holding anti-government protests at every opportunity,many of which have been broken up by police who have arrested hundreds of demonstrators.
