According to AP,France's interior minister signed an order on Monday paving the way for the possible release of a man convicted of assassinating former Iranian Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar. A Paris court is set to rule Tuesday on Ali Vakili Rad's release from prison where he has been serving a life sentence since 1994 for the strangling and stabbing death of Bakhtiar, then 76. Ali Vakili Rad was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Bakhtiar but became eligible for parole in July 2009. 

 

 

About Bakhtiar and the story of the assassination.

 

Out of Paris, Bakhtiar led the National Movement of Iranian Resistance, which fought the Islamic republic in his homeland. In July 1980 he escaped an assassination attempt in his home in the Parisian suburb, Suresnes, which killed a policeman and a neighbor. But on 7 August 1991, Bakhtiar was murdered along with his secretary, Soroush Katibeh, by three assassins in his home. Bakhtiar and his personal secretary, Fouroush Katibeh, greeted the guests in a ground-floor salon. As soon as Katibeh went to the kitchen to make tea, one of the visitors leaped at Bakhtiar and, according to the autopsy report, struck a "mortal blow" to the throat. The secretary was similarly dispatched. With two knives grabbed from the kitchen, the assailants hacked at their victims' throats, chests and arms so savagely that a knife blade was broken. An hour after arriving, Boyerahmadi calmly collected the trio's passports, and the men drove off in an orange BMW. The guards failed to notice that Vakili's and Azadi's shirts were drenched in blood. Bakhtiar's dead body was not found until at least 36 hours after his death, despite the fact that he had heavy police protection and that his killers had left ID (presumably faked) with a guard at his house. Two of the assassins escaped to Iran, but the third, Ali Vakili Rad, was apprehended in Switzerland, as well as an alleged accomplice, Zeyal Sarhadi, a great-nephew of former president of Iran Hasemi Rafsanjani, and both were extradited to France for trial. Vakili Rad was sentenced to life in prison in December 1994, although Sarhadi was acquitted. Bakhtiar is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery, in Paris.

 

Hours after the assassination of Bakhtiar, a British hostage was released from Lebanon, presumably held by Hezbollah, but a French hostage was taken. Although many in the Iranian exile community speculated of official French complicity in Bakhtiar's death, the second kidnapping is said to cast a shadow over such theories, allegedly as the French would seem unlikely to support an operation that included the kidnapping of another French hostage in Lebanon, although there is no apparent connection between the two events.