Word: shahpour
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...monumental impact across the Islamic world may appear to have been inevitable. It seemed like anything but certain destiny, however, to those of us on board the Air France 747 taking Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini from Paris to Tehran that morning in 1979. The exiled Shah's Prime Minister, Shahpour Bakhtiar, still controlled the country and commanded the armed forces, and our immediate concern was whether the air force might decide that the best way to solve the problem of what to do with the radical fundamentalist leader would be to blow us out of the sky. That threat didn...
...sweltering August afternoon in 1991, three dark-haired men approached an ivy-covered villa in the Paris suburb of Suresnes. It was the home of Shahpour Bakhtiar, 76, exiled former Prime Minister of Iran and a leader of the anti- Khomeini opposition. Since fleeing Tehran in 1979, Bakhtiar had been one of the most closely guarded men in France, watched over by paramilitary police 24 hours...
Last Tuesday hard-line fundamentalists apparently bent on sabotaging Rafsanjani's rapprochement with the West stabbed to death Shahpour Bakhtiar, the Shah's last Prime Minister, inside his home in a Paris suburb. This was the second attempt on Bakhtiar's life, and its success embarrassed the French government. The four-member police detail that watches Bakhtiar's house round the clock did not even notice that anything was amiss until 36 hours after the slaying...
...Shah's basic plan of asking one leader to assemble a coalition government seemed sound, but he was having a hard time convincing anyone of stature to serve. At the end of the year, Shahpour Bakhtiar, a Western-educated moderate, accepted the position of Prime Minister. The newly chosen leader demonstrated surprising strength and independence, immediately calling for the Shah to leave Iran, for the secret police to be disbanded, for those responsible for shooting demonstrators to be tried and for civilians to be in charge of Iran's foreign affairs...
...boat off the coast of Spain demonstrated that the small royalist faction led by former General Bahram Aryana remains alive, but it proves little else: the ship was surrendered to France and ultimately sent to the Iranian government, after bobbing around off the port of Cadiz for a week. Shahpour Bahktiar, the French-educated politician who was jailed by the Shah but then served as his last Prime Minister, lives in exile outside Paris; he has no sizable following. Within Iran, most opposition groups now tacitly support the Mujahedin. The pro-Soviet Tudeh (Communist) Party has discredited itself...