Donald Trump, Israeli forces and the release of Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert have all been linked to the killing of Iran’s top nuclear scientist.
And Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has promised to seek revenge.
So what happened, and why should we be worried?
On Friday, an Iranian scientist called Mohsen Fakhrizadeh – believed to be the brains behind a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program – was ambushed with explosives and machine gun fire in the town of Absard, 70 kilometres east of Tehran.
So far, no one has claimed responsibility for the attack.
However, given Israel is already the key suspect behind a string of attacks on Iranian nuclear figures, fingers are pointing to Jerusalem as the main culprit.
Ahron Shapiro, a senior policy analyst at the Australia Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, said it was in the interests of many groups – not just Israel – to thwart Iran’s nuclear program by killing Mr Fakhrizadeh.
“There’s no question that anybody who wants to act against an Iranian nuclear weapons program would be looking at this particular scientist as somebody who is a real threat,” he said.
“Whoever did it probably did it with the blessing of the United States in one way or another, whether it was implicit or explicit.”
Read the article by Samantha Dick in The New Daily.