Word: motahari
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Tehran, and Ayatullah Morteza Motahari, one of Iran's leading Islamic theologians, was leaving a home where he had been conferring with Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan. Behind the holy man, out of the shadows, stepped two gunmen. Motahari never saw them. A single shot rang out, and he fell mortally wounded with a bullet through the back of his head. His killers fled...
...first assassination of an important figure since the Shah's ouster three months ago. Two weeks earlier Major General Mohammed Vali Gharani, who was army chief of staff briefly under the revolutionary government, had been shot down outside his home by three unknown attackers. But Motahari's killing was especially ominous, since he was a member of the Revolutionary Council, a group of clergymen and other figures who report to the revolution's spiritual leader, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the provisional government of Prime Minister Bazargan. The names of the members of the Revolutionary Council have never...
Next day an obscure group called Forghan sent a letter to a Tehran newspaper saying it had killed the Ayatullah. Government officials later confirmed that Motahari had been a council member. Although little was known about Forghan, a Persian word that is both a synonym for the Koran and a term for something that separates right from wrong, the group purports to oppose the growing power of the Islamic clergy. Post-assassination leaflets distributed by the group deplored the rise of "akhoundism," a term meaning government by the mullahs...
TEHRAN, Iran--One of Iran's top Moslem leaders, Ayatollah Morteza Motahari, a close associate of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was assassinated as he left a dinner party in Tehran, Iranian officials said yesterday...
...caller said Motahari was head of the secret Islamic Revolutionary Council set up by Khomeini. Among its other duties, the council supervises the revolutionary courts which have sent 164 persons before firing squads...