TEHRAN, Iran — At the gallows, the condemned prisoner Tuesday repeated the allegations Iran lodged against him: That he was trained by Israel's spy agency to carry out one of the first attack on Iranian scientists in a suspected shadow war against Tehran's nuclear ambitions.
"The end of the road has nothing except repentance — and rope," Majid Jamali Fashi was quoted as saying just moments before he was hanged for the January 2010 bombing that killed Tehran University physics professor Masoud Ali Mohammadi.
The execution inside Tehran's Evin Prison — and Iran's state-sanctioned coverage of his purported last words — are connected to a world of alleged covert operations and assassination plots that have stretched from the Black Sea to Bangkok, and yet have somehow not disrupted efforts at nuclear talks between Iran and world powers, which are expected to resume next week in Baghdad.
At least four other members of Iran's scientific community have been killed since the explosion of a bomb-rigged motorcycle that targeted Mohammadi.