Around 9:00 on a heat summer time night time, he was driving his white Renault L90 sedan together with his daughter close to his house when two gunmen on a bike drew up beside him, Iranian information media later reported. Five photographs had been fired from a pistol fitted with a silencer. Four bullets entered the automobile by way of the driving force’s facet and a fifth hit a close-by automobile.
As information of the taking pictures broke, Iran’s official information media recognized the victims as Habib Daoud, a Lebanese historical past professor, and his 27-year-old daughter Maryam. The Lebanese information channel MTV and social media accounts affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps reported that Mr. Daoud was a member of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group in Lebanon.
It appeared believable.
The killing got here amid a summer time of frequent explosions in Iran, mounting tensions with the United States, days after an infinite explosion in the port of Beirut and every week earlier than the United Nations Security Council was to contemplate extending an arms embargo towards Iran. There was hypothesis that the killing might have been a Western provocation supposed to elicit a violent Iranian response in advance of the Security Council vote.
And the focused killing by two gunmen on a bike match the modus operandi of earlier Israeli assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. That Israel would kill an official of Hezbollah, which is dedicated to combating Israel, additionally appeared to make sense, apart from the truth that Israel had been consciously avoiding killing Hezbollah operatives in order to not provoke a battle.
In reality, there was no Habib Daoud.
Several Lebanese with shut ties to Iran stated that they had not heard of him or his killing. A search of Lebanese information media discovered no reviews of a Lebanese historical past professor killed in Iran final summer time. And an training researcher with entry to lists of all historical past professors in the nation stated there was no document of a Habib Daoud.
One of the intelligence officers stated that Habib Daoud was an alias Iranian officers gave Mr. al-Masri and the historical past instructing job was a canopy story. In October, the previous chief of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, Nabil Naeem, who referred to as Mr. al-Masri a longtime pal, advised the Saudi information channel Al Arabiya the identical factor.
Iran might have had good motive for wanting to cover the truth that it was harboring an avowed enemy, but it surely was much less clear why Iranian officers would have taken in the Qaeda chief to start with.
The post Al Qaeda’s No. 2, Accused in U.S. Embassy Attacks, Is Secretly Killed in Iran appeared first on Pehal News.
