The real question is, why would they lie about this? I don't believe the remote control truck story. It seems unlikely that a remote control pick up truck by itself would be able to take on an armored convoy. Perhaps the attackers escaped and Iran doesn't want the egg on its face of letting multiple attackers escape. That being said, I'm not sure that having a single jerryrigged remote control truck take out one of your most highly protected individuals is much better...
Because some super high tech attack doesn’t look as bad as the little/big satan being able to put in half a dozen assets into play in your country and take out one of your highest value assets and get away with it.
Your comment makes me think of the worst conspiracy theory possible: what if Israel and Iran were both involved in this killing? Or maybe some Iranians did it?
They have the motive and this is just as plausible as the absurd high tech idea being floated. Both Israel and Iran benefit from increased tension before the new administration is in office...
Some Iranians were definitely involved since who ever did it had to use at least some local assets.
Could the Iranian state be responsible for this? Possibly but not particularly likely, could it been an internal conflict within the IRGC or between the IRGC and the local criminal underground (yes this is a thing, the IRGC often supplements it’s income by running criminal enterprises in the region) a bit more likely but still less likely than a combined western effort to take him out.
I don’t think Israel could or well would pull this off alone, by all accounts whilst Israel does operate a very large humint network in Iran much larger than the US ever managed to set up (in fact by published accounts, Israel is the one who’ve always provided the human element in joint operations) they still heavily rely on US intelligence and operational support.
Before JCPOA was signed the “rumor” was that one of the sticks and or plan B was a pretty extensive plan to take out quite a few very high value Iranian targets of the map and that plan didn’t include buildings but rather was a direct threat to essentially take out anyone of any importance especially in the IRGC.
This seems to be the second and quite likely last at least for a while (due to the US elections result) operational use of that “backup plan”.
As far as conspiracies go or at least corruption I would put KSA pressuring Trump to do something before he leaves office in exchange for financial favors over anything else.
Never in my life did I imagine I'd come across a Daily Mail article labelled as a "thorough and believable report". It's half banned as a source on Wikipedia for crying out loud
The Daily Mail publishes a lot of articles by contributing journalists, Harriet Alexander is actually a pretty good journalist https://twitter.com/h_alexander
Well, completeness and superficial verisimilitude is proobably easier when you can just invent a story based on what people are likely to find believable with as much detail as you want because you don't have any journalistic standards.
(However, that site is a nightmare of ads, popups and auto-playing video, only legible with uMatrix.)
It's also legible, I'd even call it pleasant, with Firefox plus NoScript. Many sites block or degrade images when JS is disabled, but not the Daily Mail.
> The real question is, why would they lie about this?
Because a public story completely unconnected with the facts give your adversaries no information about what you've actually worked about the attack.
Why would you use that particular story may be a harder question, but a robot attacker might have a better propaganda look than something revealing, say, betrayal by agents within highly-trusted security services.
