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How Iran Kills Abroad

(Wall Street Journal) Roya Hakakian - On Sept. 17, 1992, two men burst in on a private dinner at Berlin's Mykonos restaurant where eight of Iran's leading opposition figures were seated. One thrust his gloved hand into the sports bag that hung on his shoulder and machine-gun bullets riddled the guests. Four died that night. The lead shooter, an Iranian named Abdulrahman Bani-Hashemi, flew to Turkey and crossed the border into Iran. Two years earlier, he had attempted to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Sweden. The Swedish authorities detained, then released, him. Three years before, he had assassinated an Iranian exile, a former pilot named Morad Talebi, in Switzerland. Two weeks after the Mykonos restaurant murders, German authorities arrested several men in connection with the attack. Only one of them was Iranian. The rest belonged to a ring of small-time Lebanese crooks. In May 1993, the German chief federal prosecutor submitted his indictment - in which Iran's ministry of intelligence was implicated in the crime. During the four-year trial, a top official of Iran's ministry of intelligence defected and testified that there was a list of 500 individuals, "enemies of Islam" who Tehran had systematically pursued to annihilate. There are staggering parallels between the plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington and the Mykonos hit. The writer is the author of Assassins of the Turquoise Palace, about Iran's extraterritorial terror campaign against Iranian exiles.
2011-10-19 00:00:00
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