Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is alive after an assassination attempt, “informed sources” told Iran International on Tuesday.
Sources quoted by Iran International, a Persian-language satellite TV channel and multilingual online news agency based in London, said Ahmadinejad was not injured and had been moved to safety.
Over the weekend, amid Israel's attacks, Iranian media circulated conflicting reports about Ahmadinejad's fate, with some sources saying he had been killed, while others said they could not confirm this version.
The ILNA news agency initially wrote that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been killed during a bombing of Tehran, in his home in the east of the Iranian capital, along with his bodyguard. This information could not be independently verified.
Then ISNA, another Iranian news agency, published a statement by Ahmadinejad on the killing of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose death had been announced on state television overnight Saturday into Sunday.
Later, the Iranian Dolate Bahar party also reported that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is the leader of the formation, had not died. “Dolate Bahar announces that the reports about the martyrdom of Dr. Ahmadinejad in the American-Israeli attacks are false,” a party statement said.
Who is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
During his eight-year term as president (2005 – 2013), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (69) was initially a favorite of Shia clerics, but also of conservatives and more radical politicians in parliament.
However, towards the end of his term, his policies were increasingly questioned, and his strategy regarding the Iranian nuclear program led to numerous international sanctions against Tehran and, subsequently, to the economic crisis, note DPA and Agerpres.
Ahmadinejad has become the target of international criticism particularly because of his anti-Semitic comments. During his presidency, Iran was internationally isolated due to military threats against Israel and Holocaust denial.
His supporters increasingly contested his policies, and even the most radical considered him a controversial figure towards the end of his term.
Iran's leadership, eliminated
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of the Islamic regime, was killed on Saturday morning in a US airstrike on his residence in Tehran, carried out as part of a large-scale joint military operation launched by US and Israeli forces. He ruled Iran for 36 years.
Incidentally, several members of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's family were killed in the weekend attacks. According to Iranian media, the ayatollah's daughter, son-in-law and grandson were also killed.
Khamenei's wife, Mansoureh Khojasteh Bagherzadeh, also died of her injuries on Monday. She was 79 and in a coma following the raid.
In fact, several top officials of the Tehran regime have lost their lives so far.
According to Axios, those confirmed to have been killed include:
- Ali Shamkhani, Khamenei's top security adviser;
- Mohammad Pakpour, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps;
- Aziz Nasirzadeh, Minister of Defense;
- Mohammad Shirazi, Khamenei's chief military secretary;
- Saleh Asadi, head of Iran's military intelligence service;
- Hossein Jabal Amelian, Chairman of SPND (Iranian Nuclear Weapons Research Organization);
- Reza Mozaffari-Nia, former president of SPND.
One of the senior officials who survived is Ali Larijani — the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, a former parliament speaker and one of Khamenei's closest confidants.
How Iran's leadership was beheaded
US President Donald Trump appeared to confirm that US intelligence played a direct role in tracking and targeting Khamenei, saying the Ayatollah “couldn't avoid our intelligence and our sophisticated surveillance systems”.
The Financial Times revealed on Monday that Israel spent years hacking Tehran's traffic cameras and monitoring Iranian bodyguards before the supreme leader's assassination. Almost all traffic surveillance cameras in the Iranian capital have been hacked for years, with their images encrypted and transmitted to servers in Tel Aviv and southern Israel.
One of these cameras allowed the Israeli military (IDF) to see where officials in Tehran parked their personal cars and provided details of the operation of part of the ayatollah's residence.
Furthermore, Israeli intelligence was able to tap into cell phone towers near Pasteur Street, making the phones appear busy when receiving calls and preventing Khamenei's security team from receiving possible warnings.
Long before the bombs fell, “we knew Tehran like we know Jerusalem,” said one Israeli intelligence official.
“And when you know (a place) as well as the street you grew up on, you only notice one thing that's out of place,” he added.
“In Israeli intelligence culture, targeting intelligence is the most critical tactical issue — it's designed to enable strategy,” said Itai Shapira, a brigadier general in the Israeli military reserve and a 25-year veteran of its intelligence directorate. “If it is decided that someone should be killed, in Israel the culture is: 'We will provide the information about the targeting,'” he added.
This was accompanied by an unprecedented disabling of Iran's air defenses through a combination of cyber attacks.
“We took their eyes first,” said an intelligence official. Both in the June war and now, Israeli pilots used the Sparrow missile, variants of which are capable of hitting a small target, such as a table, from a distance of more than 1,000 kilometers.
And when the CIA and Israel arranged for Khamenei to hold a meeting Saturday morning at his offices off Pasteur Street, the chance to kill him along with much of Iran's senior leadership seemed extremely opportune.
The intelligence services estimated that hunting down Islamic regime officials after the start of a war would have been much more difficult because the Iranians would have quickly engaged in evasive practices, including going underground to bunkers immune to Israeli bombs.
At the same time, the Israeli services had information following the hacking of traffic cameras and mobile phone networks. One of the people said this showed the meeting with Khamenei went ahead as scheduled, with high-ranking officials heading to the venue.
Details provided by the head of the US military
The US military then cleared the way for Israeli fighter jets to bomb Khamenei's compound by launching cyber attacks “that disrupted, degraded and blinded Iran's ability to see, communicate and respond,” General Dan Caine, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, later revealed.
The first actions were carried out by the US Cyber Command and the US Space Command to jam and disrupt the operation of Iranian radar and communications systems.
The initial attack was launched with “a trigger event carried out by the Israel Defense Forces, facilitated by the US intelligence community,” said General Dan Caine, referring to the Israeli bombing of the Tehran residence of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
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According to information obtained by the US, a meeting of the ayatollah with dozens of senior Iranian political and military officials was to take place there. Thus, the operation was thus launched on Saturday morning with a surprise Israeli bombing of Khamenei's residence.
The latter, members of his family and more than 40 officials who came to that meeting died as a result of the bombing.
