Iran has arrested more than two dozen people, including senior intelligence officers, military officials and staff workers at a military-run guesthouse in Tehran, in response to a huge and humiliating security breach that enabled the assassination of a top leader of Hamas, according to two Iranians familiar with the investigation.
The high-level arrests came after the killing in an explosion early Wednesday of Ismail Haniyeh, who had led Hamas’s political office in Qatar and was visiting Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new president and staying at the guesthouse in northern Tehran, Iran’s capital.
The fervor of the response to the killing of Mr. Haniyeh underscores what a devastating security failure this was for Iran’s leadership, with the assassination occurring at a heavily guarded compound in the country’s capital within hours of the swearing-in ceremony of the country’s new president.
“The perception that Iran can neither protect its homeland nor its key allies could be fatal for the Iranian regime, because it basically signals to its foes that if they can’t topple the Islamic Republic, they can decapitate it,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran director for the International Crisis Group.
Officials in both the Middle East and in Iran itself have said the deadly blast was the result of a bomb that had been planted in Mr. Haniyeh’s room as long as two months before his arrival.
Iranian officials and Hamas said Wednesday that Israel was responsible for the assassination, an assessment also reached by several U.S. officials. Israel, which has vowed to destroy Hamas’s governing and military abilities, has not acknowledged that it was responsible for planting the bomb.
The Revolutionary Guards Corps’ specialized intelligence unit for espionage has taken over the investigation and is hunting down suspects that it hopes will lead it to members of the assassin team that planned, aided and carried out the killing, according to the two Iranian officials, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the investigations.
The news of the sweeping arrests came after the Revolutionary Guards announced in a statement that “the scope and details of this incident are under investigation and will be announced in due course.”
