This undated image released by the U.S. government shows the steel liner for the reinforced concrete reactor vessel before it was installed at a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor in Syria.

Syrian activists said Sunday unidentified assailants killed five nuclear engineers on Sunday while they were on a bus just north of Damascus, near the research center where they worked.

“Unidentified attackers murdered five nuclear energy engineers who worked in the scientific research Centre near the neighborhood of Barzeh, northern Damascus,” Rami Abdel Rahman, the director of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights Observatory, told AFP.

The monitoring group, which relies on a network of sources on the ground for its reports, was unable however to say how they were killed or supply their nationalities.

“It was not immediately clear whether the bus that they were travelling on was hit by a bomb, or by gunfire,” Abdel Rahman told AFP.

In July last year, six people who worked at the same center were killed in a mortar attack carried out by rebels seeking President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster.

Another military research center, also near Damascus, was also hit by a deadly Israeli raid in May 2013.

A poster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad adorns a wall as the vehicle of United Nations special envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura leaves his hotel on Sunday in Damascus. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Sunday that unidentified attackers murdered five nuclear energy engineers who worked in the scientific research center near the neighborhood of Barzeh in northern Damascus.

 
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