• In December, the Shah’s nephew Shahriar Shafigh is assassinated in France.
1980 • In July, former Iranian minister Tabatabai is assassinated at his residence in Washington, D.C.
• In September, Iraq invades Iran.
• Abulhassan Banisadr becomes president.
1981 • Ronald Reagan becomes the fortieth president of the United States. The American hostages return to the United States as he is taking his oath of office.
• In June, President Banisadr and his government fall. He flees to France.
• In December, the DPKI declares the overthrow of the Iranian regime as one of its goals.
1982 • Iran establishes Hezbollah in Lebanon to expand its influence within the region.
• An assassination attempt is made on the former Iranian prime minister Shapur Bakhtiar in France.
1983 • Hezbollah attacks the U.S. Marine Corp barracks in the Lebanon killing 241 American servicemen.
1988 • The Iran-Iraq war ends.
• Ayatollah Khomeini issues a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, calling for his death.
1989 • In June, Ayatollah Khomeini dies.
• In July, the leader of the DPKI, Ghassemlou, and two of his colleagues are assassinated in Vienna.
• The Berlin Wall falls.
1990 • In April, a member of the Iranian opposition, Kazem Rajavi, is assassinated in Switzerland. The French return several terrorists to Iran citing national interest.
1991 • The politician and entrepreneur Abdulrahman Boroumand is assassinated in France.
• Prime Minister Shapur Bakhtiar and his assistant are assassinated at his residence in Paris.
• The fall of the Soviet empire.
• The two Germanys are united.
1992 • In June, the popular singer Fereydoun Farrokhzad is beheaded at his residence near Bonn, Germany.
• In September, the Mykonos terror team enters Germany.
• The annual conference of the Social Democratic Party of Germany begins to which the DPKI sends its top three officials.
• On September 17, Jalal Talebani, then a Kurdish dissident, meets Sadegh Sharafkandi at the conference and warns him of an assassination plot against him. That night, at about 10:45 p.m., the three Iranian Kurdish leaders, along with their long-standing friend Noori Dehkordi, are shot to death at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin.
• On September 18, Germany’s chief federal prosecutor Alexander von Stahl announces in a press release that the murders at Mykonos involve the nation’s national security and thus assigns a prosecutor from his office, Bruno Jost, to take on the case.
• In December, at their Edinburgh meeting, EU members pass a resolution to begin a “critical dialogue” with Iran, aimed at creating closer Iran-European relations.
1993 • In May, Chief Federal Prosecutor Alexander von Stahl submits the indictment to the Berlin Court.
• In August, von Stahl is forced to resign from his post.
• Trade between Iran and Germany reaches an historic high: 7 billion DM, making Germany Iran’s premier trading partner.
• The opposition leader Muhammad Hussein Naghdi is assassinated in Rome, Italy.
• In early October, Iran’s minister of information Ali Fallahian makes a secret visit to Germany.
• On October 29 the Mykonos trial begins.
1996 • The German Supreme Court issues an arrest warrant for Iran’s minister of intelligence, Fallahian.
• In May, Iran’s former deputy minister of education Reza Mazlouman is assassinated in France.
• In July, six leading writers and intellectuals, members of the PEN chapter in Iran, are invited to the home of the German ambassador’s cultural attaché in Tehran. The dinner is raided by the Revolutionary Guards.
• In November, the prominent Iranian writer and editor Faraj Sarkohi disappears on his way to visit his family in Hamburg, Germany.
1997 • On April 10, the judgment of Berlin’s high criminal court is announced.
• In their show of support for the judgment, all EU member nations shut their embassies in Tehran.
• In June, the reformist presidential candidate Khatami wins election by a landslide.
Glossary
Agha. Mister (Persian)
Baba or Babayee. Father (Persian)
Iman Ali. The cousin and son-in-law of Prophet Muhammad and the first iman of the Shiite Muslims.
Jaan. Dear (Persian)
Kaak. Brother (Kurdish)
Maadar. Mother (Persian)
Majles. Parliament (Persian)
Maman. Mother. Originally French, the term is popularly used by Iranians
Mola. Beloved mentor (Persian)
Moosh mooshak. Little mouse (Persian)
Peshmarga. Freedom fighter (Kurdish)
Characters
The Victims
Noori Dehkordi—Murder victim and organizer of the meeting at the Mykonos restaurant; an opponent of Iran’s regime and supporter of the Kurds
Sadegh Sharafkandi—Mykonos murder victim, nicknamed “The Doctor”; chairman of Iran’s Democratic Party of Kurdistan (DPKI), 1989–1992
Fattah Abdoli—Mykonos murder victim, DPKI deputy
Homayoun Ardalan—Mykonos murder victim, DPKI deputy
Parviz Dastmalchi—Survivor; author and close friend of Noori, and the most outspoken survivor of the Mykonos assassinations
Mehdi Ebrahimzadeh—Survivor; leading political activist
Aziz Ghaffari—Survivor; owner of the Mykonos restaurant
Shohreh Badii Dehkordi—Widow of Noori Dehkordi; political activist
Sara Dehkordi—Daughter of Noori and Shohreh Dehkordi
Salomeh Dastmalchi—Daughter of Parviz Dastmalchi
The Perpetrators
Abdulrahman Bani-Hashemi—Leader of the terror team, still at large
Abbas Rhayel—Terror team’s second assassin, friend to Yousef
Yousef Amin—Terror team’s watchman
Kazem Darabi—Coordinator and financier of the operation; member of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence
Attaullah Ayad—Member of the terror team
The Key German Players
Alexander von Stahl—Germany’s Chief Federal Prosecutor, 1990–1993
Bruno Jost—Federal Prosecutor for the Mykonos case, 1992–1997
Hans Joachim Ehrig—Lead Attorney for the victims, 1992–1997
Otto Schily—Attorney and Former Interior Minister
Klaus Kinkel—Foreign Minister 1992–1998
Helmut Kohl—Chancellor 1982–1998
Frithjof Kubsch—Chief Judge presiding over the Mykonos trial from 1992–1997
Judge Jurgen Zastrow—One of the Mykonos trial’s five judges
Judge Alban—Chief Judge Kubsch’s deputy
Gregor Gysi—Attorney and member of the Bundestag
Wolfgang Wieland—Attorney for the victims 1992–1997
Bernd Schmidbauer—Federal Intelligence Chief 1991–1998
Klaus Grunewald—Middle East Director, Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution
The Iranian Regime
Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—President 1989–1997
Hussein Moussavian—Ambassador to Bonn 1990–1997
Ali Akbar Velayati—Foreign Minister 1981–1997
Ayatollah Ali Khamanei—Supreme Leader 1989–present
Abulhassan Banisadr—President 1980–1982
Miscellaneous Characters
Abulghassem Farhad Messbahi or Witness C
Renata Kakir—Resident of Prager Street and trial witness
Abdulrahman Ghassemlou—Popular leader of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan, assassinated in Vienna in 1989
Hadi Khorsandi—Exiled Iranian satirist against whom Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in 1980
Hamid Nowzari—Political activist
Abulghassem Zamankhan—The trial’s chief Persian interpreter
Norbert Siegmund—Young
journalist who worked with Parviz to uncover the truth of Mykonos
Josef Hufelschulte—Journalist for FOCUS
Note on Sources
In 2005, when I first began to look into the story of the Mykonos assassinations, I quickly learned that sifting through the urban legend and the truth would be a monumental task. Therefore, establishing a timeline of events and the arc of the narrative alone became my first goal. To that end, I conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with the following individuals, among others:
Jalil Azadikhah, Shohreh Badi’i-Dehkordi, Bob Baer, Abolhassan Banisadr, Mehran Barati, Minu Barati, Nasrin Bassiri, Roya Boroumand, Fred Burton, Chief-in-charge of Hall 700 at Berlin’s Moabit Court, Parviz Dastmalchi, Salomeh Dastmalshi, Sara Dehkordi, Wilhelm Dietl, Rudolf Dolzer, Mehdi Ebrahimzadeh, Hans Joachim Ehrig, Ali Ferdowsi, Owen Fiss, Dieter Grimm, Ashraf Golpaygani, Alexander Jost, Angela Jost, Barbara Jost, Bruno Jost, Hadi Khorsandi, Werner Kolhoff, Martin Kubsch, John Langbein, Abolghassem Messbahi, Hamid Nowzari, Owner of Ms. Saigon (formerly known as the Mykonos Restaurant), Mehran Payandeh, Ahmad Rafat, Habib Rahiab, Ewald Riethmüller, Kambiz Rousta, Hamid Sadr, Sahraoui, Ali Sajjadi, Bahman Sarayi- Moghadam, Mohsen Sazegara, Norbert Siegmund, Rudolf Steinberg, David Unger, Sandra Volck, Alexander von Stahl, R. James Woolsey, Abolghassem Zamankhan.
The reporting of the following journalists proved to be invaluable to my work:
Wilhelm Dietl and Josef Hufelschulte in Die Focus; Sigrid Avaresh and Werner Kolhoff in Berliner Zeitung; Rudiger Scheidges in Der Taagespiegel; Norbert Siegmund and Susanne Opalka in SFB and ZDF for local and national television broadcasts; and Dorothea Jung in Deutschland Radio. The publications Suddeutsche Zeitung, Der Spiegel, Der Bild, and Die Welt also helped fill in certain gaps in my knowledge of the story.
It came to me as a great surprise to find that because of the distinct nature of the German legal system, no trial transcripts existed for this case. However, as journalists and members of the victims’ families were allowed to take notes during the proceedings, I was able to glean aspects of the experience through the private journals of Shohreh Dehkordi. The daily filings of Hamid Nowzari and his collagborators and a few other Iranian journalists in the following Persian publications were similarly illuminating:
Abolhassan Banisadr, Ed. Enghelab Eslami; Biweekly (Paris); Mujahed, the Publication of Iran’s People’s Mujahedin; Parviz Ghelichkhani, Ed. Arash Quarterly (Paris); Kurdistan, the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan’s Monthly; Kar, Publication of Sazman-e Etehad-e Fadayian; Iran, Terror, Sarkoob, the Publication of the Committee Against Terror’s (Berlin, Paris).
Researching a case as lengthy and complex as this should have taken years. But because I had access to the Archives for Iranian Research and Documents and the Archives of the Iranian Political Refugee Association in Berlin, where nearly everything ever written on the case is meticulously gathered and organized, the work took only months. I owe much to the archives and the many volumes that Parviz Dastmalchi diligently printed between 1992–1998. The following is a listing of those and several of my other key primary soures:
The Attorney General of the Federal Court. Anklageschrift [Indictment]. 17 May 1993.
Dastmalchi, Parviz. The Mykonos Documents: September 1992–April 1997. Berlin: Azad Press, 1997.
Dastmalchi, Parviz. The Fall: Mykonos IV. Berlin: Azad Press, 1994.
Dastmalchi, Parviz. Governmental Terrorism in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Berlin: Azad Press, 1995.
Dastmalchi, Parviz. Democracy and Law. Berlin: Azad Press, 1996.
Dastmalchi, Parviz. The Text of the Mykonos Judgment. Berlin: Azad Press, 2000.
Khodagholi, Abbas, Hamid Nowzari, and Mehran Paydande, Eds. The Criminal System: The Mykonos Documents. Berlin: Nima Books, 2000.
Khodagholi, Abbas, Hamid Nowzari, and Mehran Paydande. There’s Still a Judge in Berlin: Mykonos Murder and Process. Berlin: Nima Books, 2000.
Kubsch, F. The Mykonos-Judgment. Edited by Hans-Joachim Ehrig. Berlin: Archive for Research and Documentation Iran- Berlin and Association of Iranian Refugees (Berlin), 1999.
Siegmund, Norbert. The Mykonos Process. Berlin: LIT Verlag Münster, 2001.
Selected Articles and Bibliography
“Historic Figures: Ayatollah Khomeini (1900–1989).” BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/khomeini_ayatollah.shtml
“The Mystic Who Lit the Fires of Hatred.” Time. 7 January 1980.
“The Connection: An Exclusive Look at How Iran Hunts Down Its Opponents Abroad.” Time. 21 March 1994.
Afshari, Reza. Human Rights in Iran: The Abuse of Cultural Relativism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
Bunegart, Luther. Memorandum to Press: On Being Dismissed by Yousef Amin as Counsel. 25 November 1993.
Clawson, Patrick. “Europe’s ‘Critical Dialog’ with Iran: Pressure for Change.” PolicyWatch 242(9 April 1997).
Farhand, Mansour. “Iran Wants to Assassinate Me. Why?” New York Times. 8 December 1993.
Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany. Summary of Facts. 13 November 1992.
Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany. Final Report. 22 August 1993.
Frase, S. J. and T. Weigend. “German Criminal Justice as a Guide to American Law Reform: Similar Problems, Better Solutions?” Boston College International and Comparative Law Review 18:2 (1995).
Grünewald, Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Memorandum to Chief Federal Prosecutor’s Office of the Federal High Court. 22 April 1993.
Haass, R. and M. L. O’Sullivan, Eds. Honey and Vinegar: Incentives, Sanctions, and Foreign Policy. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000.
Hufelschulte, Josef. “Mullahs Want to Take Revenge on Bonn.” Focus Magazine. 18 January 1993.
Jost, Bruno, Senior Public Prosecutor. Federal Criminal Police Offi ce of Germany. Preliminary Investigation of Ali Fallahian for Murder Among Other Things. 4 December 1995.
Khorsandi, Hadi. The Ayatollah and I. London: Readers International, 1987.
Khorsandi, Shappi. A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English. London: Ebury Press, 2009.
Kinzer, Stephen. “Trial Begins in Berlin for Iranian Charged in Dissident’s Death.” New York Times. 29 October 1993.
Koohi-Kamali, Fereshteh. “Nationalism in Iranian Kurdistan.” In The Kurds: A Contemporary Overview, edited by Philip G. Kreyenbroek and Stefan Sperl, 171–192. London: Routledge, 1992.
Langbein, John. Comparative Criminal Procedure: Germany. Eagan, MN: West Group, 1977.
Lazariev, M. S., Mahvi, S. K., Hasratian, M. A., and Zhigalina, U. E., Kurdistan’s History. Moscow: Forough Books, 1999.
Markham, James M. “Bonn May Balk at Extraditing Terror Suspect.” New York Times. 17 January 1987.
Matin-Asgari, Afshin. Iranian Student Opposition to the Shah. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2001.
McDowall, David. The Kurds: A Nation Denied. Austin, TX: Minority Rights Publications, 1992.
Menashri, David.“Khomeini’s Policy toward Ethnic and Religious Minorities.” In Ethnicity, Pluralism, and the State in the Middle East, edited by Milton J. Esman and Itamar Rabinovich, 216–217. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Mussavian, S. H. Challenges of the Iran-West Relations: Analysis of Iran-Germany Relations. Tehran: Center for Strategic Studies, 2006.
Norton, Augustus Richard. Hezbollah: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Pilz, Peter. Eskorte nach Teheran: Der Ősterreichische Rechtsstaat und die Kurdenmorde. Vienna: Ibera & Molden, 1997.
Sancton, Thomas. “Iran’s State of Terror.” Time. 11 November 1996.
Schmitt, Michael N. “State-Sponsored Assassination in International and Domestic Law” Yale Journal of International Law 17 (1992).
Shahrooz, Kaveh. “With Revolutionary Rage and Rancor: A Preliminary Report on the 1988 Massacre of Iran’s Political Prisioners.” Harvard Human Rights Journal 20 (2007).
Shaml
ou, Ahmad. Fresh Air: Book of Poems. Tehran: Morvarid Publishers, 1958.
Tyler, Patrick E. “Iranian Seen as Victim of Assassination Plan.” The Washington Post. 9 September 1989.
U.N. Commission on Human Rights. Report of the Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, Transparency and the Imposition of the Death Penalty. New York. March 2006.
Walsh, James. “Iran’s Smoking Gun.” Time. 21 April 1997.
Wolst, Federal High Court Judge. Haftbefehl, Der Minister für Nachrichtendienste und Sicherheitsangelegenheiten der Islamischen Republik Iran Ali Falahijan [Arrest Warrant, for Ali Falahian, the Minister of Intelligence and Security of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ali Falahian]. 14 March 1996. Die Agenten schlafen nur. Der Spiegel. 25 March 1996.
Radio, Television, Films, Audiovisual, Memos, and Electronic Material
Abdolrahman Boroumand Foundation. www.iranrights.org.
Allamehzadeh, Reza, Director. Holy Crime. 1994
Asghar Agha: Persian Satirical Monthly. Ed. Hadi Khorsandi. www.AsgharAgha.com
BBC Television. The Terror Network. 19 May 1997.
The Dehkordi family home videos.
Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan. www.pdki.org.
The personal Web site of Ali Fallahian. www.fallahian.ir.
Radio Farda Archives. “The Mykonos Assassinations Special.” September 2007.
Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. www.iranhrdc.org.
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