TEHRAN -- Iran’s Islamic
Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) on Monday said “Zionists” assassinated a colonel in Tehran earlier this month, days after the occupying regime of Israel reportedly told the U.S. it was behind the terrorist act.
IRGC Colonel Sayyad Khodai, 50, was fatally shot on May 22 outside his home in the east of the Iranian capital by assailants on motorcycles. He was hit with five bullets, according to official media.
It was the most high-profile assassination inside Iran since the November 2020 murder of top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh - an act Tehran blamed on the Zionist regime.
Col. Khodai was martyred “by the most vicious people, the Zionists, and God willing, we will avenge his death,” IRGC head Major General Hussein Salami said during a visit to his family, according to the Sepah News website.
“The enemy pursued him (the colonel) from the heart of the White House and Tel Aviv for months and years, door to door and alley to alley to martyr him,” Gen. Salami added.
The New York Times reported last week that the Zionist regime has told the United States that it was behind the assassination of Col. Khodai. The U.S. daily cited an anonymous “intelligence official briefed on the communications”.
Iran had earlier said “elements linked to the global arrogance”, its catch-all term for the United States and allies including the occupying regime of Israel, were behind the assassination.
According to the New York Times, Zionist officials claimed Col. Khodai was the deputy commander of a “secret unit” within the IRGC’s Quds Force, involved in planning operations against Zionists.
Iran’s national television has said that Khodai was a member of the Quds Force and that he was “known” in Syria, where Iran has acknowledged deploying “military advisers”.
The IRGC described Khodai as a “defender of the sanctuary”, a term used for those who work in Syria or Iraq to protect holy shrines from terrorist attacks.
On Tuesday, tens of thousands of Iranians attended Col. Khodai’s funeral, before he was buried in the martyrs’ section of Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in southern Tehran.
In a Wednesday letter to UN head Antonio Guterres, Iran’s permanent ambassador to the United Nations Majid Takht-Ravanchi warned against the dangerous consequence of terrorist and criminal acts against Iranian citizens, saying the international community must strongly condemn the recent assassination of the IRGC member in Tehran.
The Zionist regime’s footprints have already been traced into a number of attacks on Iranian nuclear sites and assassination of the country’s scientists.