A century-old medical research centre set up to fight infectious diseases like plague and smallpox has been heavily damaged in strikes on Tehran, Iran’s health ministry has said.

The Pasteur Institute of Iran, which is one of the country’s leading public health centres and is part of a global research network, plays a key role in combating infectious diseases like cholera and Covid-19.

Hossein Kermanpour, a spokesperson for Iran’s health ministry, condemned the attack as a “a direct assault on international health security,” calling the centre “a century-old pillar of global health”.

He called on the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Red Cross and global health institutions to condemn the attack and assess the damage and support its reconstruction.

Photographs from the site showed severe damage, with large parts of the facility reduced to rubble.

A series of loud explosions struck Tehran on Thursday, shaking buildings and sending shockwaves across the city, according to local media reports. Blasts were felt in central, eastern and western areas of the capital.

Esmail Baghaei, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, called the attack on the facility “heartbreaking, cruel, despicable and utterly outrageous”.

“This is not merely another war crime committed as part of an illegal war; it is a barbaric assault on basic human core values,” he wrote on X.

The Telegraph has approached the US military’s CENTCOM and the Israeli military for comment.

The Pasteur Institute of Iran was founded in 1920 through an agreement between the Pasteur Institute of Paris and Iran’s government with the aim of advancing scientific research. It is one of the oldest centres for public health research in the Middle East.

The complex in Tehran was focused on infectious diseases, helping to fight plague, smallpox, cholera, rabies, hepatitis B and tuberculosis by supporting the development of vaccines and treatments.

The 24,000-square-metre facility is home to scientific reference libraries, laboratories, and biobanks.

The Pasteur Institute in Iran has previously been the subject of scrutiny over the possibility of its facilities being misused to produce biological weapons.

In 2007, the Japanese government listed it as an “entity of concern” for biological and chemical weapons proliferation, and in 2008 Britain listed the centre as a potential risk for procurement related to weapons of mass destruction.

Dr Cassidy Nelson, the Director of Biosecurity Policy at the Centre for Long-Term Resilience, recently claimed that, by the 1990s, Iran had moved its biological weapons research “away from dedicated military sites and embedded it within civilian institutions – the Razi and Pasteur Institutes chief among them”.

“The facilities reportedly housing Iran’s programme are scattered across military, academic and research institutions. Many are likely dual-use sites with mixed civilian and military functions, where the line between legitimate research and weapons work has been deliberately blurred for decades,” she wrote in an article for the Royal United Serves Institute, a British think tank.

But it is the potential accidental release of biological agents that is the biggest cause for concern, she said.

“An accidental release from any one of these facilities – whether due to damage to infrastructure, a breakdown in protocols or simple abandonment – is a realistic possibility in the coming weeks and months.”

Vali Nasr, Professor of Middle East Studies and International Affairs at John Hopkins University, said destroying it “could have no other purpose than assaulting Iran’s history ... and [taking] Iranians back to the Stone Age”.

Donald Trump, the US president, on Wednesday again threatened to attack Tehran’s oil and energy infrastructure unless it made a deal to end the war, saying the US would bomb the country into the “Stone Ages” in the coming weeks.

“If there is no deal, we are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard, and probably simultaneously,” Mr Trump said in a national address.

It is not the first time the Pasteur Institute has been damaged since the aerial campaign against the Iranian regime began on February 28.

On March 25, Iranian officials reported that several buildings containing equipment and laboratory instruments had been damaged in an air strike, while an earlier strike on March 7 also caused damage.

The WHO has recorded 23 attacks targeting healthcare facilities in Iran since February 28.

In total, there have been over 1,600 civilians killed, including at least 244 children, since the conflict began, according to data verified by Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRANA).

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