Baladi - Monitors
The Middle East Monitor reported that Israel’s Mossad have been accused of assassinating a top Syrian scientist over the weekend.
The secret service, which was ranked the world's leader in assassinations, having carried out 800 operations in the last decade, grabbed the headlines once again for the killing of Aziz Asber, head of the Scientific Research and Studies Centre in Masyaf, MEMO wrote.
On Sunday a pro-government Syrian paper accused the Mossad of being behind the blast which also killed Asber’s driver. Both Bashar Al-Assad and Hezbollah accused Israel of assassinating the high-level scientist shortly after the bombing took place, according to the monitor.
Intelligence official quoted in the New York Times today said that Israel had been tracking Asber for years, and had wanted to assassinate him over his prominent role in Syria’s weapons programme even before the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011. He said it was the fourth time in three years the Mossad has assassinated an enemy weapons engineer in a foreign country.
Israeli sources are reporting that the country’s intelligence suspected Asber of leading a classified weapons development programme called Sector 4 at the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center, and was busy re-building an underground weapons factory to replace the one said to have been destroyed by Israel last year, said the MEMO.