According to The New York Times, citing a Middle East intelligence official, Israel’s Mossad spy agency was behind the assassination of a Syrian scientist tied to the Assad regime’s chemical weapons and advanced missile programs. Aziz Azbar was killed over the weekend in the northern Syrian city of Masyaf when a bomb apparently planted in the headrest of his car seat was detonated. The anonymous source told the newspaper that his own intelligence agency was informed in advance of the operation, and also claimed that the Mossad had a hand in at least three other targeted killings on foreign soil. Azbar reportedly was heading up a classified weapons development program called Sector 4 at the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC), and was in the process of re-building an underground production facility to replace the one allegedly destroyed last year by Israeli air strikes. Additionally, Western countries believe that the scientist was involved in engineering chemical weapons including Sarin gas, despite Syria agreeing in 2013 to remove its non-conventional arms from the country. Azbar also had close ties to both Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Qasem Soleimani, the notorious chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Crops’ elite Quds Force. In a television interview, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman adhered to Jerusalem’s longstanding policy of neither confirming or denying reports of cross-border military operations, stating, “Every day in the Middle East there are hundreds of explosions and settling of scores. Every time they try to place the blame on us. So we won’t take this too seriously.” Israel has been blamed for numerous attacks on SSRC sites, most recently on July 22.
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