Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad laid blame for the untimely deaths of top Iranian nuclear scientists directly at Israel’s doorstep Sunday. Ahmadinejad said after the death of a scientist last year that the killers had used “Zionist methods” but the latest statement, accusing Israel of “conducting terror against our nuclear scientists,” named Israel more explicitly.

In a public speech in Tehran, Ahmadinejad accused the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which he said is under U.S. control, of publishing the scientists’ names, thus making it possible for Israel to assassinate them.

At the time, the BBC cited British academics who described Mohammadi as an expert in quantum physics, a branch of physics that makes it very unlikely he was involved in nuclear research. The reformist movement in Iran, meanwhile, said that Mohammadi had supported their presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi in last year’s election, raising the possibility that the assassination was an internal Iranian poilitical hit job.

The report listed nearly a dozen scientists from Egypt, Lebanon and elsewhere whom it claimed were assassinated by the Mossad.