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Remote control truck with remote control gun, self destructed after attack
- ipsocannibal 6y agoWhy not a simple car bomb? This seems way more elaborate than necessary. What message is being sent using this mode of assassination?
- krasin 6y agoEliminating risk. Planting a car bomb is a high risk for the attacker. This remote control truck belongs to a person who left the country (Iran) about a month ago.
- amelius 6y ago> Eliminating risk. Planting a car bomb is a high risk for the attacker. But how did it self-destruct then?
- weare138 6y agoCould have been to eliminate evidence. Security services can glean alot of information from the type of equipment used and it's sophistication or conversely lack of sophistication.
- amadeusw 6y agoPlanting a car bomb on the victim's car is risky. It's safe to outfit the attacker's car with a self-destruct device in a safe garage.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoDoesn't seem like much of a risk. Fly a drone over the roof of the car, drop a block of C4, detonate.
- dogma1138 6y agoEasier said and done, commercial drones aren’t reliable and quite likely restricted goods in a country like Iran. I don’t believe this story really it seems like more of a saving face coverup than anything else. A car bomb/ied to stop the car and a few automatic weapons work just fine. If you use local assets that may not even know the actual target or don’t care also gives you sufficient plausible deniability.
- ShakataGaNai 6y agoI think it's "easier said than done" Regardless. That's all true. Also with a drone you need one that's big enough to carry at least several pounds of explosive...to handle an armored vehicle and the likelihood the detonation would be not directly next to it. You'd need FPV or something so you can guide the drone in close. Also vehicles could be moving at a reasonable place, so the drone would need to be fast enough to keep up/catch up. Could it be done? Totally. Are there easier/cheaper ways? Totally. Heck an RC Car ala Call Of Duty games would be more realistic.
- dogma1138 6y agoBut that’s the point it’s not can it be done, but can it be done effectively enough to be selected as a method of assassination. Too many things can go wrong with a finicky toy, you still need to be in line of sight most of the time and at that point two guys with AKs or an RPG are going to be a safer bet. If I had to kill someone in a hostile country I rather have to be the one that empties a mag into their car than the one controlling an RC car trying to get under their vehicle in traffic hoping the battery won’t die, the remote won’t crap out and that no small pothole or pebble on the road will send my toy car flying ala rocket league.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoImagine a phalanx of drones, one for each car in the procession, all arriving and detonating simultaneously. Not as incredible as we may imagine. If fact, pretty much the state of the art.
- 8note 6y agoCouldn't you put a bomb on the remote controlled truck? Crash into the target, then go boom
- realitysballs 6y agoA simple bomb does not have enough certainty that it will destroy its target without exerting exorbitant amounts of explosives. Yes this strategy is much more complex but I would argue it has more precision and certainty around its efficacy.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoI think the opposite is more likely. Put a bomb in a remote controlled car - you're going to need one either way - drive close to your target, detonate. Done. With a machine gun you have to drive close and then aim extremely accurately. It sounds implausible - at least not without AI superpowers in the targeting system. At the very least you'd expect lag to be a significant problem.
- thesuperbigfrog 6y agoA car bomb might accidentally kill or injure innocent bystanders. A surgically precise assassination is its own message: "We kill exactly who we mean to and you cannot stop us." Pretty scary stuff.
- ALittleLight 6y agoI'd guess that machine gunning another vehicle before self-destructing might also kill or injure innocent bystanders.
- cylon13 6y agoI'm not sure if I would call firing a truck-mounted machine gun from 150 meters away from the target and then exploding the truck a "surgically precise assassination".
- germinalphrase 6y agoParticularly when the US has demonstrated the ability to kill only one passenger in a moving vehicle with the bladed Hellfire R9X.
- freeflight 6y agoIf this setup is actually true, then that remote controlled Nissan could also have served as a VBIED: Unload from the gun until it's empty, then drive the thing into the target zone and explode it to take out whatever survived the gunfire. Tho if the source is to be trusted that's not how it happened: It exploded 150 m away in the same position it fired from. So the explosion probably only served to destroy any evidence of the implementation for the remote control. Also interesting: Earlier reports about this attack did mention suicide/car bomb being part of the attack, but allegedly only as a distraction.
- burnthrow 6y agoInitial reports were of a car bomb powerful enough to knock out a power line, and gunmen shooting the scientist up after. The only consistent thing I've read is that a Nissan was involved. We'll probably never know what actually happened. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/28/world/middleeast/iran-assassinations-nuclear-israel.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/28/world/middleeast/iran-ass...
- 1024core 6y agoThat was the truck self-destructing.
- dx87 6y agoYou could kill from much further away. Car bombs require you to be very close to ensure a kill, unless you've got something like a dump truck or cement mixer filled with explosives.
- alacombe 6y agoEffective blast radius means you need to be close to the target to ensure enough damage to terminate it. The twitter feed mention a motorcade, so the target was likely protected.
- scaramanga 6y agoAt least 3 other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed by car bomb or similar[0]. And Fakhrizadeh had a security detail. So presumably they were well prepared for such a threat. Anyway, it sounds like the remote-control-truck story is a pure fabrication. [0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nuclear_scientists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nucle...
- rbrtl 6y agoReminds me of the vehicles in the Daniel Suarez books, Daemon and Freedom.
- tiniuclx 6y agoI was unable to find the original tweets that are in the picture, do you have another source?
- Zhenya 6y agohttps://mobile.twitter.com/BarakRavid/status/1333080696282288128 https://mobile.twitter.com/BarakRavid/status/133308069628228...
- nosmokewhereiam 6y agoComments mention this same trope was used in Breaking Bad. Here's Mythbusters version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06t_KP7y8Ao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06t_KP7y8Ao
- Zhenya 6y agoOriginal tweet thread: https://mobile.twitter.com/BarakRavid/status/1333080696282288128 https://mobile.twitter.com/BarakRavid/status/133308069628228...
- 1024core 6y agoReminds me of that short movie about killer drones with built-in face recognition, so they can find the target and assassinate them with extreme precision, autonomously.
- beamatronic 6y agoThat’s not science fiction
- MaurizioPz 6y agoHe is referring to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecClODh4zYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecClODh4zYk
- 1024core 6y agoYep, that's the one!
- rkwasny 6y agoMust watch - Slaughterbots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA
- swlkr 6y agointeresting, no talk about EMP as mitigation
- _tulpa 6y agoOutside of scifi plot devices I don't see how that would be feasible.
- _iyig 6y agoThe effect of an EMP on a hardened i.e. Faraday cage-shielded target is quite limited. Even modern automobiles are only momentarily disrupted, if at all, by significant pulses produced in a controlled test setting. As I understand it, common measures taken to protect vehicle electronics against electro-static discharge (ESD) also provide some level of protection against EMP attack. Your mileage may vary with commercial off-the-shelf drones, of course, but it’s not an expensive or difficult technology to retrofit. My understanding derives chiefly from a U.S. government-commissioned study on the effects of an EMP weapon or natural disaster on things like cars, trucks, airplanes and computers. The results were made public, and are overall fairly reassuring: http://www.empcommission.org/reports.php http://www.empcommission.org/reports.php
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y agoReassuring until you realize that 0.1% of components of a complex system failing is likely to bring the overall system down. In this case: Individual controllers needed to control a power plant or factory, as well as "individual cars on a highway" (once enough break down, the highway is blocked).
- nradov 6y agoEMP is not a practical mitigation. That's something that works in movies, not real life. Generating an EMP powerful enough to damage electronics requires a large explosion to pump the coils. And even then the range is very short.
- twic 6y agoThe tweet thread is a summary of an article from Fars, the Iranian news agency: https://www.farsnews.ir/news/13990909000920/%D8%AC%D8%B2%D8%A6%DB%8C%D8%A7%D8%AA%DB%8C-%D8%AC%D8%AF%DB%8C%D8%AF-%D8%A7%D8%B2-%D8%B4%DB%8C%D9%88%D9%87-%D8%B9%D9%85%D9%84%DB%8C%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%AA%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B1-%D8%B4%D9%87%DB%8C%D8%AF-%D9%81%D8%AE%D8%B1%DB%8C%E2%80%8C%D8%B2%D8%A7%D8%AF%D9%87 https://www.farsnews.ir/news/13990909000920/%D8%AC%D8%B2%D8%... Google Translate of this article matches the summary, and mentions: "It is worth mentioning that according to the Fars correspondent, in this operation, which lasted about 3 minutes, no human factor was present at the scene of the assassination and the shootings were carried out only with automatic weapons" Wikipedia has a very different story, citing a number of sources, which involves a dozen human attackers at the scene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohsen_Fakhrizadeh#Ambush_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohsen_Fakhrizadeh#Ambush_atta...
- enkid 6y agoThe 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...
- panarky 6y agoYeah, the 100% remote control idea seems unlikely, just provides cover for Iranian leadership when they fail to find the assassins. This is a more thorough and believable report: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8997575/Assassination-Irans-nuclear-scientist-involved-62-people-including-12-gunmen.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8997575/Assassinati... (However, that site is a nightmare of ads, popups and auto-playing video, only legible with uMatrix.)
- adamjb 6y agoNever 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
- alacombe 6y agoOn a purely technical level, it's nothing very difficult, a video feed and a bunch of I/O to control the truck (either with linear actuator for steering / braking, throttle control is trivial to do electronically). Same for the gun control, a two axis mount for aiming, fire control can be done with motor and actuating a cam mechanism, and add another video feed for aiming. I'm only surprised it's not done more...
- freeflight 6y agoImho this will only become more feasible as the costs/ease for such implementations keeps getting lower with further advances towards autonomous driving. Very comparable to what happened with drones: Used to be that only very sophisticated state actors could field such weapons. But with the rise of consumer-grade drones we started to see DIY implementations where consumer-grade drones were repurposed to drop explosive packages [0]. It's even become a thing for boats, back in 2018 three remote-controlled boats attacked a Saudi-flagged oil tanker in the Red Sea [1], the most recent attack like that just happened this year in July [2]. [0] https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2017/01/drones-isis/134542/ https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2017/01/drones-isis/13... [1] https://www.marineinsight.com/shipping-news/swarm-three-remote-control-boats-red-sea-rushes-saudi-flagged-oil-tanker/ https://www.marineinsight.com/shipping-news/swarm-three-remo... [2] https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-yemen-security-saudi-boats/saudi-led-alliance-in-yemen-says-explosive-boats-destroyed-in-red-sea-idUKKBN24A17J https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-yemen-security-saudi-boats...
- 93po 6y agoI'm surprised we haven't seen this with $200 drones and a single shot gun attached, either 3D printed or otherwise DIY. Regardless of the level of security surrounding anyone other than maybe the president it seems anyone would be pretty susceptible to this and the odds of it getting traced back to someone who bought the device with cash and was careful to not touch it or leave DNA would be pretty small
- dogma1138 6y agoBecause these things aren’t reliable enough. Operations like this take years to plan and you often get only one shot. This also means that this story is quite likely fiction.
- Iolaum 6y agoThe scenario as described has many similarities with the movie 'The Jackal'. Also it says that the victim got out of the car after a distraction, even though he was traveling in a bulletproof car with an armed escort. This is a very rookie mistake for a senior official who was in enough of a threat to travel around with an escort of armed guards! I 'd be very hesitant to believe that story without independent confirmation from other sources. P.S. Some twitter replies, on the original twitter thread [0] even questioned the validity of the source but I don't know enough about it (Fars news) to evaluate those claims. Putting this out here for the HN crowd to weigh in. [0]: https://twitter.com/BarakRavid/status/1333080696282288128 https://twitter.com/BarakRavid/status/1333080696282288128
- dogma1138 6y agoYeah it’s seems to be too complicated, and intelligence agencies don’t like complicated. Assassinations are hard as it is to pull off especially in a country like Iran which is essentially a police state where every westerner and worse an Iranian that can freely travel abroad is likely under close surveillance. This operation would require you not only to bring in assets but also tech. Even if this was somehow could rigged with items you can find at “radio shack” there is no way that this would’ve passed any risk assessment too many things can go wrong. It’s by far easier to use local assets from one of the resistance groups still active in Iran or even hired guns from a criminal organization.
- BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y agoIt's less complicated however than to get 12 assassins out of the country without trace after such a messy kill.
- dogma1138 6y agoIt’s not since you’ll still need to get people into the country and quite likely people with less field experience. Not to mention that to pull anything like this off you already need to have an extensive network of assets in place. There are plenty of local resources you’ll be able to use ranging from local opposition groups to hired criminals from Iran and the Caspian region heck getting some offshoot of the Syrian opposition to lend a hand after Iran helped Assad isn’t out of the realm of possibility either. You assume this was some SEAL Team Six operation, the fact that as many as 12 people opened fire indicates it quite likely wasn’t and the assets who performed the assault itself were quite likely less trained and much more expendable.
- LyalinDotCom 6y agoLink to original poster here, the other person is giving source zero credit/link. https://mobile.twitter.com/BarakRavid/status/1333080696282288128 https://mobile.twitter.com/BarakRavid/status/133308069628228...
- sudoaza 6y agoImagine Iran killing some Raytheon employees in a terrorist attack.