Assassins of the Turquoise Palace

The author mentioned that Iran’s Minister of Intelligence, Ali Fallahian, was a fan of Navab Safavi, so I looked Navab Safavi up in Wikipedia. He was born Seyyed Mojtaba Mirlowhi and in 1946 he founded the Fadayan-e Islam, which was the Shia version of the Sunni Islamic Brotherhood (Ikhwan). Fadayan-e Islam assassinated several intellectuals and politicians in the 1940s and 1950s. Navab Savavi recruited the Ayatollah Sayyid Ruhollah Mostafavi Musavi Khomeini into his org

The author mentioned that Iran’s Minister of Intelligence, Ali Fallahian, was a fan of Navab Safavi, so I looked Navab Safavi up in Wikipedia. He was born Seyyed Mojtaba Mirlowhi and in 1946 he founded the Fadayan-e Islam, which was the Shia version of the Sunni Islamic Brotherhood (Ikhwan). Fadayan-e Islam assassinated several intellectuals and politicians in the 1940s and 1950s. Navab Savavi recruited the Ayatollah Sayyid Ruhollah Mostafavi Musavi Khomeini into his organization. After Safavi was executed in 1955, Khomeini inherited members of Fadayan-e Islam, with the help of Sadegh Khalkhali, later a major figure in Khomeini’s Iran.

The Europeans had promised the Kurds their own country when the Ottoman Empire was broken up after World War I. But Kurdistan was deleted when the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). So now the Kurds are divided between Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Iran is a multi-ethnic country: mostly Persian, but with many Azeris, Turkmen and Kurds living in the north, and many Shia Arabs and Balochi living on the south. The most famous Kurd in history was Saladin, of the Crusades.

In 2004, Tehran Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad objected to the commemorative plaque in front of the Mykonos restaurant, calling it an insult to Iran.

After the Shah Reza Pahlavi fled in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini, a Shia Muslim, promised that when he returned to Iran, he would live in the holy city of Qom to continue his religious studies. But after arriving in Iran, he settled in Tehran and began persecuting various minorities. Most of Iran’s 4 million Kurds are Sunni Muslims and live in the Zagros Mountains in the northwest. Kurdish Iran became a haven for dissidents, which is one reason Khomeini persecuted the Kurds. The expat satirist Hadi Khorsandi has pointed out that there is freedom of speech in Iran, there is simply no freedom after speech.

Turquoise Palace is where the Committee for Special Operations meets. The committee has five members:

Khomeini had a hit list of Iranian dissidents who had fled abroad. Prior to the Berlin restaurant massacre, Iranian agents had already attacked dissidents in Paris, Manila, Bombay, Karachi, Istanbul, Vienna, Geneva, Stockholm, and Tokyo.

When the U.S. cut ties with Iran in 1979, Germany became a major trading partner of Iran.
Iranian agents captured and held hostage European nationals, so that in return for releasing the hostages, European governments would allow Iranian agents to infiltrate into Europe and assassinate Iranian dissidents.
Chancellor Helmut Kohl apologized to Iran for hurting Iran’s feelings by investigating Iran’s possible involvement in the Mykonos assassinations.

The assassinations occurred during the evening of 17 September, 1992. The restaurant owner, Aziz Ghaffari, was suspected, but not convicted, of spying on the Kurdish dissidents. The four men who were killed were Kurdish exiles from Iran. All except Noori Dehkordi were members of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan.

Norbert Siegmund, journalist at ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen) television station, who, on the Sunday Berliner Abendschau local broadcast, showed a photograph of suspects Kazem Darabi, Yousef Amin, and Abbas Hossein Rhayel

At first, German authorities thought that the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) of Turkey was behind the Mykonos assassinations.
Evidence that the assassins were not from Turkey: they spoke Persian to their victims.
The handgun used in the assassinations was traced to a 1972 shipment to the Iranian Royal Army.