Word: motahari
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Despite Thursday's ostensibly being a day of mourning, the mood on the streets was almost jubilant. A 2-year-old flashed the peace sign from a car on the jammed Haqqani Expressway. Groups of women waved green banners above their heads near Vanak Square. Protesters near Motahari Street, once they realized that nearby riot forces had been recalled to the massive Imam Khomeini Mosalla (mosque) prayer complex, burned tires and chanted all sorts of seditious phrases, including "Die Mojtaba" (a reference to the second son of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, thought by many to be groomed as his successor...
...gave the deposed Shah his weapons?" asked Rafsanjani. "Who supported him as long as he could kill?" At week's end Rafsanjani was himself shot and wounded in an assassination attempt by Forghan, a terrorist group that earlier killed a former army chief of staff and Ayatullah Morteza Motahari, one of Iran's leading theologians...
...include two businessmen who had held no official positions in the Shah's regime. At the same time, the conflict between the ruling Islamic conservatives and the angry left grew wider, as government and religious leaders blamed the Communists for the assassination on May 1 of Morteza Motahari, a prominent Ayatullah and a member of the Revolutionary Council...
Although twelve reputed members of Forghan are reported to have been arrested for the murders of Motahari and Major General Mohammed Vali Gharani, former army Chief of Staff, the government was releasing little information on the case. Leaflets left by the group tried to portray its members as devoted to "Islam without the clergy." But many observers, in fact, believe that the professionally carried-out assassinations were the work of former SAVAK agents bent on creating anarchy or of vengeance squads associated with former top officials who have been executed...
Criticism of the regime seems to be rising at both extremes of Iran's political spectrum. Hours before Motahari's murder, 200,000 demonstrators, most of them leftists, joined in a May Day march in Tehran to protest high unemployment and the stagnation of the country's economy. Trying to cool tempers, Islamic leaders called on all Iranians to exercise "revolutionary patience" and cautioned against "professional, foreign-led agitators and antirevolutionaries...