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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Jason Burke in Jerusalem

‘Sixty seconds, that’s all it took’: the clinical Israeli-US operation to kill Ali Khamenei

A satellite image of the destroyed residential complex in Tehran where Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed
A satellite image of the destroyed residential complex in Tehran where Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed. Photograph: Vantor/Reuters

The assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was the culmination of decades of painstaking intelligence gathering by Israeli secret services, with crucial technological resources and manpower provided over the last six months by the CIA and other US intelligence services, which culminated in a single concentrated burst of lethal violence to decapitate the Iranian regime, according to experts, veteran spies and officials in Israel and the US.

Khamenei was killed along with seven “members of the top Iranian security leadership who had gathered at several locations in Tehran” and about a dozen members of his family and close entourage in near-simultaneous strikes within 60 seconds, military officials in Israel said. Forty other senior Iranian leaders also died in the attack.

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