A senior official from an intelligence agency in the Middle East has revealed that the assassination of one of Syria’s most important rocket scientists Aziz Isber in a car bomb explosion in the northern city Maysaf late Saturday was the handiwork of Israel’s spy agency Mossad.

According to New York Times report from Jerusalem, an unnamed official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Israel was behind the attack and said his own intelligence agency had been informed of the Israeli operation.

The scientist’s surname is spelled differently by New York Times, The Times of Israel and Syrian news agency SANA. NYT spelled it as Absar, the Israeli newspaper called him Abzar while Syrian official agency described him as Isber.

NYT report further said that Ibser was one of Syria’s most important rocket scientists, bent on amassing an arsenal of precision-guided missiles that could be launched with pinpoint accuracy against Israeli cities hundreds of miles away.

The report said that Isber was working alongside Maj Gen Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ elite al-Quds Force and enjoyed high level access to both the Syrian and Iranian governments.

Meawhile, the Times of Israel reports that a senior Israeli government official has declined to comment on the report Tuesday, but noted it was “a good thing” that Isber was dead.

The unanimous official, who spoke to NYT, said that Israel had been tracking Abzar for years, and had wanted to assassinate him over his prominent role in Syria’s weapons program even before the outbreak of the civil war in 2011. He claimed that it was the fourth time in three years the Mossad has assassinated an enemy weapons engineer in a foreign country.

He had free access to the highest levels of the Syrian and Iranian governments, and his own security details. He led a top-secret weapons-development unit called Sector 4 and was hard at work building and underground weapons factory to replace one destroyed by Israel last year.

Syrian official news agency SANA reported on Monday that “The assassination of Dr. Isber came to complement the crimes of the Israeli and US enemies, who have targeted the Syrian Scientific Research Center multiple times through launching direct aggression due to its role as a leading scientific institution in Syria and to reaffirm and prove again the involvement of Israel”.

Times of Israel report say that a Hamas rocket scientist was shot dead by gunmen in Malaysia in April and a drone engineer was killed in Tunisia in December 2016. Hamas blamed Israeli spy agency Mossad for both killings.

Iran had also alleged Israeli involvement in assassinating four nuclear scientists: Masoud Alimohammadi, Majid Shehriari, Rezaeinejad and Mustafa Ahmadi roshan,  between 2010 and 2012.

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