Word: ayatullah
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...flames of vengeance once again raged over the Islamic Republic of Iran. The government took the extraordinary step last week of closing its borders for four days as officials marshaled a gigantic man hunt for fugitives accused of involvement in a military plot to overthrow the regime of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. The vengeance even spread abroad as a hit squad in Paris tried to assassinate former Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar, the man many Iranians believed had masterminded the July 9 coup attempt...
...week's end the roundup had netted more than 500 suspects, including two of Bakhtiar's cousins, Abbas Qoli Bakhtiar and Samsam Bakhtiar, and the Shah's former Health Minister, Anoushiravan Pouyan. The closed-door trial began on Saturday at the Military Revolutionary Tribunal in Tehran. Ayatullah Seyyed Mohammed Beheshti, the hard-lining president of the Supreme Court, had previously announced that "the plotters are facing the death penalty." There seemed little doubt that his grim threat would be carried out with the same judicial severity that sent 42 other Iranians to their death last week...
Bakhtiar's implication was also affirmed in a series of dramatic televised confessions by some of the alleged conspirators, including Colonel Nader Vahdatipour and retired Brigadier General Ayatullah Mohaqqeqi. Vahdatipour said the plot had originally been based on the military's desire to save Iran from Communism. The conspirators, he added, got in touch with Bakhtiar only after forming their own clandestine organization...
Queen, who was released two weeks ago by Iran's Ayatullah Khomeini after 250 days as a hostage, was then taken to Georgetown University Hospital. There he will be debriefed by State Department officials and treated for multiple sclerosis, which U.S. doctors last week diagnosed as his affliction. The physicians who examined him at the U.S. Air Force hospital in Wiesbaden, West Germany, are optimistic that Queen will suffer only mild and transient effects from the disease...
...wonder, then, that the U.S. has suffered some acute headaches this past year watching its allies-its official friends-in various tests and then deciding which of them is worthy of the name. If Britain was true blue in joining the American shout at the Ayatullah, was Australia less of a friend in refusing to support the Olympic boycott? What of France, of France especially, America's oldest international friend, its Revolutionary War buddy? How could it turn its back on the U.S.? The fact is that France, irritating as its behavior may be, as strictly disloyal...