A Truly Unsafe Job

The pay might be good, the prestige high, but being an Iranian nuclear physicist comes with certain drawbacks:

Bomb attacks have killed a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist and wounded another in Tehran, state TV reported today.

Attackers riding on motorcycles attached the bombs to the car windows of the scientists as they were driving to their workplaces this morning, the station's website said.

One bomb killed Majid Shahriari, a member of the nuclear engineering faculty at the Shahid Beheshti University, in Tehran. His wife, who was in the car with him, was wounded.

The second blast seriously wounded the nuclear physicist Fereidoun Abbasi,52, also a professor at Shahid Besheshti University, and his wife. Confusion surrounded reports of a third explosion. Javanonline, a newspaper website close to the Revolutionary Guards reported that another explosion in Tehran killed two people but semi-official news agency Fars published an interview with Tehran's chief of police insisting there had only been two blasts.