Iran: Satellite-Controlled Gun that Killed Nuke Chief Used ‘Artificial Intelligence’

The assassination of Iran’s nuclear weapons mastermind Mohsen Fakhrizadeh last week was carried out using a satellite-controlled machine gun with “artificial intelligence,” the deputy commander of the country’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) told local media Sunday.

According to Rear-admiral Ali Fadavi, Fakhrizadeh was driving outside Iran’s capital Tehran with a security detail of 11 Guards on November 27 when the machine gun which was mounted on a Nissan pickup truck “zoomed in” on his face and fired 13 rounds.

The machine gun honed in on the target using an “advanced camera and artificial intelligence” and was being “controlled online,” the Mehr news agency quoted IRGC chief Fadavi as saying.

It “focused only on martyr Fakhrizadeh’s face in a way that his wife, despite being only 25 centimeters (10 inches) away, was not shot,” he said.

Fadavi also said that the head of Fakhrizadeh’s security detail sustained four bullets “when he threw himself” on his ward.

He added that there were “no terrorists at the scene.”

At Fakhrizadeh’s funeral last week, the secretary of the country’s Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani said Israeli remote-control “electronic devices” had killed the scientist.

After the funeral, the regime’s English-language Press TV reported a weapon uncovered at the scene of the attack outside of Tehran carried “the logo and specifications of the Israeli military industry.”

The Al Alam news site, another state-run outlet, cited an anonymous source as saying there was proof Israel was behind the killing.

Shamkhani also told state TV Iran’s enemies had attempted “a number of failed operations” against Fakhrizadeh in the past.

“This time, the enemy applied a completely new, professional and sophisticated method,” he said. “No individual was present at the site.”

According to a Fars news report report, the car exploded once it had finished raining bullets on Fakhrizadeh from a distance of roughly 150 meters (500 feet).

However, other outlets published entirely different descriptions of the events, saying dozens of Israeli operatives were on the ground and an explosion took place before a fire fight, which forced Fakhrizadeh’s security detail to stop the convoy.

According to an unnamed Western intelligence source who spoke to Israel’s Channel 12, Fakhrizadeh’s killing was the “pinnacle” of Israel’s long-term plans to curtail Iran’s nuclear weapons program.