Dan Williams demonstrates Reuters brand of "investigative journalism"

Reuters correspondent Dan Williams, who never lets the facts get in the way of a good anti-Israel story, also writes anti-Israel stories when he has no facts.

An Iranian chemical scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, was killed in a car bombing yesterday.  Though no one was arrested, no group claimed responsibility for the bombing, and the Iranian regime has numerous enemies, both foreign and domestic, who would like to see the country's weapons program set back, Iran immediately blamed the United States and Israel.  And that's good enough for Williams:

Israel uses risky "hits" in deadly shadow war

Without offering a shred of evidence, Williams employs a combination of innuendo, anonymous or decontextualized quotations from former Israeli officials, and wholly unrelated examples of past alleged assassinations by the Israeli espionage service to argue presumptively, that Israel was responsible for the killing.  To wit:

Cold-eyed calculus guides what Israeli officials call "precision thwarting", a euphemism that strives to focus blame on those marked for death while conveying reluctance to escalate the shadow war.

Critics condemn all such attacks on moral grounds, and also question the long-term efficiency of targeted killings, but Israeli officials, drawing on years of experience in the murky practice, believe they play a vital role in defending the state. [...]

As always, Israeli officials declined any comment on the death of Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, who was blown up in his car, while Iran itself immediately pinned the blame on Israel. [...]

"They are not keeping to the schedules they would like to keep to," former Mossad spymaster Meir Dagan said in a recent television interview, smilingly crediting the apparent sabotage spree to "God, who controls everything". [...]

Happy to deflect the blame, Israeli officials say many people have an interest in sabotaging Iranian operations. [...]

another suspected Mossad team smothered Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in his Dubai hotel in 2010.

Williams' reference to the killing of al-Mabhouh as being the work of a "suspected Mossad team" is particularly amusing as no Israeli has been arrested or formally implicated in that incident either, despite nearly two years of investigations and a great deal of similar innuendo produced by Williams and his colleagues at Reuters at the time.

Regrettably, we don't know who killed Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan.  But neither does Williams.  The difference between us is that we don't pretend to know something we don't and try to manipulate our audience, with nothing but smoke and mirrors, into buying our "investigative journalism".