State-sponsored assassination: New tools, old questions
It was over within seconds: a hail of gunfire amid the hills and orchards east of Tehran. Yet last month’s deadly strike against a key figure in Iran’s nuclear program has roots stretching back 2,500 years, to an ancient struggle for supremacy in China – and future implications going well beyond its effects on today’s Middle East.
For the attack on Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was the latest sign that assassination (“targeted killing” in modern military parlance) – a practice shunned internationally and legally proscribed for over a century – is finding official favor again and making a comeback.
And where once the assassin may have wielded simply a sharp knife, today he might use space-age technology. According to the latest Iranian account of the attack on Mr. Fakhrizadeh, almost certainly carried out by the Israelis, he was killed by a truck-mounted machine gun. But no one fired it, Iran said. It was operated by remote control via satellite, using facial recognition technology
