Prominent Iranian military scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, killed in an attack outside Tehran on Friday, was widely seen by Western intelligence as the mastermind of clandestine Iranian efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Iran denies Fakhrizadeh was involved in any such undertaking and that it ever tried to weaponise uranium enrichment for nuclear energy. But he is widely thought to have headed what the U.N. atomic watchdog and U.S. intelligence services believe was a coordinated nuclear arms program that was halted in 2003. Western officials and experts believe Fakhrizadeh played a pivotal role in past Iranian work to devise the means to assemble a nuclear warhead behind the facade of a declared civilian uranium enrichment programme. Iran denies ever having sought to develop a nuclear weapon. He lived in the shadows under high security and was never made available to U.N. nuclear investigators. Fakhrizadeh […]