Family members of Colonel Sayad Khodai, a member of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, weep over his body in his car after he was reportedly shot by two assailants in Tehran, Iran, May 22, 2022. (Handout via Reuters
Iran's hardline president vowed revenge on Monday over the killing of a senior Revolutionary Guard member gunned down in the heart of Tehran the day before, a still-mysterious attack on the country's powerful paramilitary force.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi hailed Col. Hassan Sayyad Khodaei as a martyr and blamed “the hand of global arrogance,” a reference to the United States and its allies, including Israel, for his slaying.
There has been no claim of responsibility for the killing, carried out on Sunday afternoon by two unidentified gunmen on a motorbike. They shot Khodaei five times in a car, an unarmored budget SAIPA Pride - among the cheapest, most-common Iranian vehicles.
But the style of the brazen attack bore the hallmarks of previous slayings in Iran blamed on Israel, such as those targeting the country's nuclear scientists.
“I have no doubt that revenge against the criminals for the blood of this martyr is assured,” Raisi said before leaving Tehran for a state visit to the sultanate of Oman, a strategic Gulf Arab state that traditionally mediates between Tehran and the West.
His remarks suggested Khodaei's power and prominence in the murky structure of the Guard, which exerts extensive control inside Iran and across the Middle East via allied militias.
The Guard identified Khodaei as a “defender of the shrine,'” a reference to Iranians who fight against the extremist Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq within the elite Quds force that oversees operations abroad.
While Iran has yet to offer any definitive biographic information on Khodaei, Israeli media on Sunday night ran simultaneous stories alleging Khodaei had organized plots against Israeli diplomats, businesspeople and other foreign officials abroad.
The news reports, all of which ran without attribution, suggest Israeli intelligence officials briefed journalists on the Iranian colonel. There was no official comment from the Israeli government.
Iran has accused Israel of carrying out similar motorbike slayings targeting Iranian nuclear scientists a decade ago. In the last year, Iran blamed Israel for a particularly high-tech killing that targeted Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the country's chief nuclear scientist that masterminded the Islamic Republic's disbanded military nuclear program. A remote-controlled machine gun killed him on a country road.
The killing of Khodaei comes at a fraught time for the country. Negotiations with the Biden administration aimed at restoring the tattered nuclear agreement remain deadlocked, apparently over whether to lift the U.S. terrorism designation on the Guard. The European Union's envoy for the nuclear talks visited Tehran earlier this month in hopes of finding a compromise, apparently without results.