Iran's ruling clergy uses funeral of nuclear scientist to urge unity Iranian mourners carry the flag-draped coffin of Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, whose assassinationTehran blames on Israel and the west. Photograph: Mojtaba Heidari/AP Iran's ruling clergy has used the funeral of an assassinated nuclear scientist to urge Iranians to back forthcoming elections and help Tehran faces down western threats over its nuclear programme. Hundreds of chanting mourners on Friday carried the flag-draped coffin of Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, who was killed on Wednesday by a bomb attached to his car by men on a motorcycle. Death to America! Death to Israel!" shouted a crowd as it left weekly prayers at Tehran University, where the dead man was hailed as a martyr. "Nuclear energy is our absolute right!" young men chanted. US and European sanctions and fears of war with Israel and the west added to the high emotion in the Iranian capital. State radio described Ahmadi-Roshan, a 32-year-old chemical engineer whose driver was also buried on Friday, as having worked on procurement for the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. There has been speculation that he had been target by Israeli and western agencies. They are sceptical about Tehran's assertion that it is not seeking to develop atom bombs, pointing to covert Iranian purchases. With popular discontent in Iran growing over economic hardship and the lack of political freedoms, the clerical elite has portrayed western hostility toward Iran's leaders and their nuclear energy programme as a spur to national unity and for suppression of dissident voices. Ayatollah Mohammed Emami-Kashani told worshippers that the assassination - the latest of several attacks Iran blames on foreign agents - should encourage voters not to heed opposition calls to boycott a parliamentary election on 2 March. The vote will be a first test for an increasingly fractured leadership since major street protests that followed the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in August 2009 and the popular uprisings against autocracy hit Iran's Arab neighbours over the past year. "The nation should wake up," Emami-Kashani said in his sermon, repeating a warning by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that its western enemies were plotting to use the election to destabilise the Islamic Republic. We have the election coming up and, as the leader said, the enemy is planning for the elections. All the people should be united. Ahmadi-Roshan - whose family have appeared on state television accusing Iran's enemies of killing him - was to be interred at a shrine close to another nuclear scientist who was assassinated in the same way two years ago. Ahmadinejad, who was away on a tour of Latin America, was reported by the Isna news agency as saying: "Once again the dirty hands of arrogance and the Zionist elements have deprived our scientific and academic community of the graceful presence of one of our young intellectuals and scientists. Those criminals who think they can impede Iranian intellectuals and elites in their growth and evolution should know that such behaviour does not only not prevent the dear country from its development path but it multiplies Iranians' will and determination to pursue their national pride in the world's scientific fields. Mohammad Javad Larijani, the secretary general of the Iranian High Council for Human Rights, has written to the UN human rights commissioner calling for a committee to be set up to investigate the killing, the Fars news agency reported. UN officials have said "extrajudicial executions" are illegal, but that it is up to Iran in the first instance to investigate. Israel, which has talked of military action to thwart any Iranian nuclear weaponry, has made no comment. Israel has a history of killing enemies abroad and had warned Iran only this week to expect more "unnatural" mishaps if it pursued its research and development in nuclear science. Some Iranians have called for reprisals against Israel, which many presume has a nuclear arsenal. The US, sympathetic to its ally's view that an Iranian atomic bomb could threaten the Jewish state's existence, has strenuously denied killing the scientist and says it is sticking to economic sanctions to change Tehran's mind. "We have some ideas as to who might be involved," the US defence secretary Leon Panetta said on Thursday. But we don't know exactly who was involved.