Senior Iranian Nuclear Scientist Linked to Iran’s Military Nuclear Program killed

June 24, 2025 1435

On June 24, 2025, Mohammad Reza Sedighi Saber—a senior Iranian nuclear scientist and IRGC officer—was killed in an Israeli airstrike in northern Iran, just hours before a U.S.-brokered ceasefire ended the 12-day Iran-Israel war. Saber headed the Shahid Karimi Group within SPND, a military-controlled organization central to Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons efforts. His assassination highlights the depth of Iran’s military involvement in its nuclear program and underscores Israel’s strategy of targeting not only infrastructure but key personnel sustaining the program.

**

Dr. Mohammad Reza Sedighi Saber, a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist and senior officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was killed on June 24, 2025, in an Israeli airstrike on his parents' home in Astaneh-ye Ashrafiyeh, Gilan Province. The strike occurred just hours before a ceasefire went into effect, ending 12 days of intense conflict between Iran and Israel.

The apartment where the assassination was carried out.

Saber had previously survived an assassination attempt 11 days earlier and fled Tehran to Gilan for safety. His 17-year-old son was killed days before his own death in a separate Israeli strike on their family home in the Iranian capital.

At the time of his death, Saber headed the Shahid Karimi Group within Iran’s Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND), a highly classified entity operating under IRGC oversight. SPND, established by the late Mohsen Fakhrizadeh—who was himself assassinated in 2020—is believed by Western intelligence agencies to be deeply involved in nuclear weapons-related research, particularly in the area of high explosives relevant to nuclear warhead development.

In May 2025, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Saber for his role in activities tied to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. His name has appeared in multiple Western intelligence assessments linking him and other senior Iranian figures—such as Majid Shahriari, Fereydoun Abbasi Davani, and Ali Reza Mola Heidar—to past nuclear weapons experiments, including some conducted at the highly scrutinized Parchin military complex.

The targeting of Saber reflects not a shift but rather the strategy Israel has developed to address the Iranian nuclear threat: to strike both enrichment facilities and other installations related to the nuclear program, as well as scientists (centers of knowledge) primarily associated with the military components of the nuclear program and those who have coordinated it. Israel leveraged the recent attack to combine both focal points of activity.