Mykonos assassination: contract killers of the mullahs in Berlin | Asia | DW
“For Iran’s agents, the Mykonos assassination would have been another contract killing in Europe like many others, if only it hadn’t caught the media’s attention,” says Mostafa Ghazizadeh, Germany representative of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (DPK-I). in an interview with Deutsche Welle. Four leading members of his party were assassinated on September 17, 1992. There are 29 shots from a submachine gun and a pistol in a restaurant called Mykonos in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin.
The Kurds in exile had traveled to Berlin under false names to attempt a congress of the “Socialist International”. This is a worldwide umbrella organization of socialist and social democratic parties and organizations. One of them is the DPK-I, which is banned in Iran. She fights for an autonomous region inside Iran. About 11 million Kurds live in the structurally weak western provinces of Iran. They suffer from a dilapidated infrastructure, high unemployment and a chronic lack of hospitals and schools.
Plaque in front of the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin, which started in 2004
The Tehran central government’s response to the resistance is to suppress and eliminate the leaders, including abroad. Three years before the Mykonos attack, the Secretary General of the DPK, Abd el-Rahman Ghassemlou, and two of his companions had been shot in the head in a private apartment in Vienna. “This assassination attempt in 1989 found no media coverage in Austria and was quickly covered up,” says Ghazizadeh. The suspects in Vienna later went into hiding in the Iranian embassy and were able to leave the country after intervention by the Iranian government.
The then head of the political section of the Austrian Foreign Ministry, Erich Maximilian Schmid, said in a TV interview in April 1997 after his retirement that the Iranian ambassador had indicated “quite clearly” that “it could be dangerous for Austrians in Iran “, the suspects should be brought to justice in Austria.
Abd el-Rahman Ghassemlou was assassinated in Vienna on July 13, 1989
arrest after assassination
The Iranian killer team that traveled to Berlin shortly before the Mykonos attack can also be certain. Two of them stayed in Germany and were arrested shortly after the assassination. Interpol found three more abroad. The team consists of four Lebanese and one Iranian who is believed to have planned the assassination. His name: Kazem Darabi.
The German judiciary was determined to act. This was rather uncomfortable for the federal government. 1992 Tehran War a major trading partner. Germany sold goods to Iran for the equivalent of 4.1 billion euros that year. Both countries had signed numerous agreements, stressed Hossein Mousavian, who was Iranian ambassador to Germany at the time, in July 2022. In an interview with the Teheraner Zeitung, Etemad reports on cooperation projects with German companies that wanted to rebuild the infrastructure in Iran after eight years of war (Iraq-Iran War 1980-1988).
Arrest warrant against intelligence chief
The government in Tehran has denied any involvement in the Mykonos attack. The Iranian secret service chief Ali Fallahian even traveled personally to Germany and met Bernd Schmidbauer, Minister of State in the Chancellery in October 1993.
The federal government came under pressure from the media and parliamentarians. What did Fallahian want in Germany? According to a report by the news magazine Spiegel, the Attorney General in Karlsruhe even wanted to have Fallahian arrested.
From the point of view of the federal government, however, the head of the secret service enjoyed immunity as a state guest. Fallahian is said to have tried to get the suspected planner of the assassination, Kazem Darabi, released, ex-ambassador Mousavian recalled in the Etemad interview. In 1995, the Federal Court of Justice finally issued an arrest warrant against Fallahian for involvement in the Mykonos assassination.
Elaborate process
The legal processing of the assassination took place in a complex and spectacular process. It ran for 247 days of trial, 166 witnesses were heard. The verdict was reached on April 10, 1997: Iranian Kazam Darabi was sentenced to life imprisonment. In the verdict, the Iranian secret service chief Fallahian was named as the perpetrator of the crime. As a result, all EU countries except Greece withdrew their ambassadors from Tehran.
Joy after the verdict was announced in the Berlin-Moabit courthouse. In the background the widows of the murdered politician Mohammadpour Dehkordi die
For Iran, the trial and the verdict trigger a political earthquake. The country was isolated and repulsed in anger. In September 1997, Iran arrested a German businessman in Tehran and sentenced him to death by stoning for having had an illicit sexual relationship with a Muslim woman in Iran. Germany did not allow itself to be blackmailed. After more than two years, Iran released the man.
Deportation after barter?
Darabi was released himself after 15 years in prison and was deported to Iran in December 2007. Before that, a German imprisoned in Iran was released in March 2007. “The Germans tricked the Iranian government and only released me after 15 years,” wrote Darabi in his autobiography. According to the German Criminal Code, a life sentence can be suspended after 15 years.
The Mykonos assassination and the work of the German judiciary is causing massive damage to Iran’s image. Despite this, Tehran stuck to its state terrorism. In May 2020, the US State Department placed Iranian intelligence chief Ali Fallahian on the sanctions list for involvement in acts of terrorism by the Islamic Republic of Iran abroad. The US accuses Iran of waging a “global terror campaign” that has included up to 360 assassinations and bombings. This also includes a failed bomb attack in the middle of Europe. The Iranian diplomat Assadollah Assadi was arrested in Germany in June 2018 as the mastermind.
Assadollah Assadi, Iranian diplomat sentenced to 20 years in prison for planning terrorist attacks in Europe
Assadi was transporting around a pound of TATP explosives plus detonators. The aim of the bomb attack was a mass demonstration by the opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in June 2018 in a suburb of Paris. In 2021, the diplomat was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
The Iranian secret service is still very active in Germany. According to the current report by the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the Iranian opposition is still the focus of the Iranian secret service.