Yahya el-Mashad (1932-14 June 1980) was an Egyptian nuclear scientist who helped the nuclear program of Ba'athist Iraq. He was assassinated by Mossad in 1980.
Biography[]
Yahya el-Mashad was born in Benha, Egypt in 1932 and graduated from Alexandria University's electrical engineering department. In 1956 he traveled to London in the United Kingdom for his studies, but the Suez Crisis and the ensuing war between Britain and his home country of Egypt forced him to go to Moscow in the Soviet Union instead. In 1964 he became a professor of nuclear engineering at Alexandria University, and he worked on the Egyptian nuclear program until it was frozen after the 1967 Six-Day War. He traveled to Iraq and helped them with their program, and in 1980 he headed to Paris to acquire a shipment of uranium from France to give to Saddam Hussein. On 14 June 1980 he was stabbed multiple times and his throat slit by Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, to halt Iraq's nuclear program.