The "New York Times" claims: the kidnapping of two Revolutionary Guard generals was the work of Israel.
The American website "New York Times" claimed today in a report that Israel kidnapped two Iranian generals and killed one of them in order to find Ron Arad, the missing pilot of this country's air force; While Israeli intelligence evidence shows that Iran actually had no role in the disappearance of the Israeli pilot.
On October 16, 1986 1,365, an Israeli F-4 was targeted in an operation in southern Lebanon. Ron Arad, the aircraft's weapons officer, ejected after the fighter was damaged and was captured by Lebanese forces. Israel believed Iran had handed him over later and handed him over to Iran. His fate was never definitively determined.
According to the New York Times report, Sardar Alireza Asghari, one of the former commanders of the Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force and a former deputy of the Iranian Ministry of Defense, traveled to Istanbul in December 2006.
He stayed at the Jilan Hotel and then he disappeared. Israel denied any involvement in his disappearance. But three former US officials who worked closely with Israel told The New York Times that Mossad agents kidnapped him, interrogated him for weeks and then killed him.
According to one of these sources, Asgari was interrogated on a ship and his body was thrown into the Black Sea.
According to this report, the Mossad assumed that General Asgari had information about the fate of the Israeli pilot due to his close relationship with Hezbollah and his presence in Lebanon after the disappearance of Ron Arad. But the investigations did not show any connection between Askari and the Arad case.
In September 1400, Israeli agents kidnapped General Abdullah Sabri, one of the advisors of the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards, in Damascus. Zabri boarded a taxi when he was an Israeli agent and was led into the van using a large refrigerator box. They took him to Israel and interrogated him about Ron Arad.
After a long interrogation he was left on the street in Johannesburg, South Africa, and then returned to Iran. He later said he was answering.
The head of the Mossad at the time, David Barania, approved the operation to obtain information about Arad and defined it as a daring but unsuccessful operation.