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Tabatabaei was murdered by David Belfield, an African-American Muslim convert who admitted his guilt in a 1996 interview with the U.S. television network ABC News. Belfield had changed his name to Dawud Salahuddin. He said he was paid $5,000 by the Khomeini regime to kill Tabatabaei.
The culprit fled to Iran via France and Switzerland, and adopted a new career as a film actor, taking on a second alias as Hassan Tantai and performing in the widely-praised Iranian feature Kandahar, released in 2002. Belfield/Salahuddin/Tantai remains on the FBI Wanted List as he continues to live in Iran. During the current crisis the U.S. Christian Science Monitorinterviewed the killer, under the name Salahuddin, from Istanbul. Salahuddin discounted the allegations against Arbabsiar. He further alleged that after his murder of Tabatabaei, "several [Iranian assassination] attempts in the U.S. that Salahuddin was aware of failed."
But already at the end of 1979, soon after the victory of the Islamic Revolution, prince Shahriar Shafiq, the ex-shah's nephew, and the second son of Iranian princess Ashraf, was walking on a Paris street carrying groceries to his sister's apartment. A young man, later identified as a certain Boghraie, pulled out a 9-millimeter pistol, and shot Prince Shafiq in the back of the head, in the middle of the sidewalk.
In 1991 came the murder in France of political leader Shapour Bakhtiar, the last prime minister of Iran under the former shah. Bakhtiar was killed along with his secretary, Soroush Katibeh. The Iranian regime had assigned five different terror teams to the Bakhtiar case, and in 1980 an attack on Bakhtiar's home in a Paris suburb left a neighbor and French policeman dead. But the Iranians were intent on their goal, and more than a decade after his departure from power, Bakhtiar was slaughtered. The means utilized was a bread knife, in an apparent attempt to make the crime look like a quarrel in which the blade had been taken up as a weapon of opportunity.
Two members of the death squad escaped to Iran, but two others were apprehended. Ali Vakili Rad was caught in Switzerland and arrested with an alleged accomplice, Zeyal Sarhadi, a great-nephew of then-president of Iran Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Both men were extradited to France. Vakili Rad was sentenced to life imprisonment but Sarhadi was acquitted. Vakili Rad served 18 years behind bars and was released in May 2010.
A series of homicidal attacks on Iranian Kurdish leaders bears a resemblance to the plot against Al-Jubeir, in the commission of a major crime in a restaurant in Berlin, Germany. In 1989, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDP of Iran or KDPI), travelled to Vienna for a meeting with emissaries of Rafsanjani. Ghassemlou, who had led the KDPI since 1973, was found by Austrian police; his bullet-riddled body was seated in an armchair. Two more KDPI delegates, who had previously conferred with the Iranian authorities, Abdullah Ghaderi Azar and Fadhil Rassul, lay dead on the floor nearby.
Within hours, the Austrians recovered the murder weapon, and had one suspect, Amir Mansur Bozorgian, in custody and the second in a hospital, and knew the identity of the third. Soon, they found enough evidence to indict all three; but they were released. Nevertheless, the Austrians issued arrest warrants for high Iranian officials in the Ghassemlou case.
Ghassemlou's successor as KDPI leader, Sadegh Sharafkandi, was murdered in Berlin in 1992, after participating in a meeting of the Socialist International. Sharafkandi was killed at the Mykonos Restaurant in the German capital, with three colleagues, Fattah Abdoli, Homayoun Ardalan and their translator Nouri Dehkordi. Five death squad members were arrested in the Mykonos affair and tried by the Germans: an Iranian, Kazem Darabi, and four Lebanese recruited from Hezbollah and the Lebanese Shia Amal party.
Swedish Social Democratic leader Ingvar Carlsson was scheduled to attend the dinner at the Mykonos Restaurant with the Sharafkandi group and Pierre Schori, former Swedish state secretary for foreign affairs. But the two Swedes and their colleague, then-prime minister Carl Bildt, were called back to their homeland. If Carlsson and Schori had joined the Kurds in the Mykonos, they might very well have been killed in the brutal assault. As in the Al-Jubeir conspiracy discussions, other potential victims in the restaurant were dismissed as insignificant.
The Mykonos Restaurant attack was authorized by the elite "Special Affairs Committee" of the Iranian regime, made up of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Rafsanjani, minister of intelligence Hojjatoleslam Ali Fallahian and then-foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati. In 1997, during the German trial of the five Mykonos Restaurant defendants, German authorities declared that the slaying had been ordered by Khamenei and Rafsanjani. Darabi, the go-between to the Lebanese, and one of the latter, Abbas Hussein Rhayel, were convicted of full responsibility in the crime, and sentenced to life imprisonment in Germany, but were released and deported to Iran in 2007. Two of their Lebanese accomplices received short sentences, and one was acquitted.
Another infamous assassination committed by Iranians acting abroad was that of Fereydoun Farrokhzad, a prominent Iranian singer and figure in the émigré opposition to the clerical regime, killed in his Bonn home in 1992. Farrokhzad's murder occurred only five weeks before the Mykonos horror and is still classified by the German authorities as "unsolved." Farrokhzad was stabbed to death. His apparent offense, in the view of the tyrants of Tehran, was that he served as a broadcast technician for a radio program, "The Voice of the Flag of Freedom Organization of Iran," which supports the former monarchy.
More recently, in 2001, the Iranian Kurdish Sufi musician Seyed Khalil Alinejad, aged 44, was killed in Göteborg, Sweden. Seyed Khalil was also done to death with a kitchen knife, as in the Bakhtiar case, before a fire that broke out in the bottom two floors of a structure where he taught oriental instruments and singing to children and adults. An acquaintance in the Revolutionary Guard Corps told Seyed Khalil that the musician had been declared an apostate from Islam and was considered one of the two most dangerous Sufis in Iran. This was motivated by the open declaration of Seyed Khalil that the "People of Truth" or "Ahl-e Haqq," the Sufi movement to which he belonged, was independent from Islam. His case is likewise "unsolved" by the Swedish authorities, though his admirers, who are many, firmly believe the Iranian government was responsible. Seyed Khalil Alinejad was the most beloved young traditional Iranian musician of his time.
The extreme risk in trying to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington may reflect aggravated anxieties at the summits of Iranian power. There, factions headed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei continue machinations against each other while facing repudiation of support for either from the Iranian people. Iranian involvement with Latin American malefactors becomes less dubious a possibility when one considers the close relationship between Ahmadinejad and the terror-supporting dictator of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. In the Argentine Israeli embassy and AMIA cases, Hezbollah supporters in the "border triangle" where Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina come together have often been mentioned. The bloody trail left previously by Iranian agents around the world makes such an effort as that of Mansour Arbabsiar, however bizarre its details or unimpressive the personality of the defendant, entirely credible.