Word: iranian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...were unable to smash through Bakhtiar's armored door. The attackers also shot and killed a woman neighbor and exchanged gunfire with police as they tried to flee the building. The three gunmen were arrested, and police hauled in two other suspects the following day. A militant Iranian group calling itself the Guards of Islam claimed to have ordered Bakhtiar's execution. Iran's Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, however, denied his government's involvement...
Bakhtiar, the last Prime Minister of the former Shah, allegedly figured at the center of the aborted "Zionist-Iraqi-U.S." plot. According to President Abolhassan Banisadr, the conspirators intended to occupy two Iranian airbases and bomb a number of strategic targets. Among them: Khomeini's home north of Tehran, the Tehran International Airport and Faizieh religious school in the holy city of Qum. Tehran spokesmen charged that the plotters hoped to tell Iranians over radio and television that "the patriotic army of Iran has overthrown the rotten government of the mullahs," and then invite Bakhtiar back from...
...right of a people, when they are deprived of freedom, of human rights, to rebel," he said. "It was an insurrection. It was not a plot. It is Khomeini himself who is pushing people to revolt." Bakhtiar, who has been an active leader of the anti-Khomeini forces among Iranian exiles in Europe, had no choice but to deny involvement. To do otherwise might jeopardize the political asylum that the French government gave him after he fled from revolutionary Iran last year. In London, however, an associate told the Financial Times that Bakhtiar had been involved in the coup attempt...
...Tehran, some Western diplomats interpreted the release of Queen as "a good signal," possibly even a sort of trial balloon by Iranian authorities to determine how the populace would react. Others saw the release of Queen as a convoluted maneuver by Iran's clerical establishment to embarrass the beleaguered Banisadr. Observed a senior civil servant: "If Banisadr's rivals in the clergy were indeed trying to prove who is boss in Iran, they did an excellent job." Most Iranians believed that Khomeini, who chose to release five women and eight black male hostages last November, had simply decided...
...military plot to overthrow his government had been foiled on the eve of a coup d'état. Seventeen officers from an armored division had already been put on trial, he said. The plot was said to have been organized at a military base near the western Iranian city of Hamadan. At week's end, there were reports that 350 more conspirators, including such high-ranking officers as the former air force commander and the chief of the rural police, had been arrested in what appeared to be an attempt to purge the armed forces...