Assassination of Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou

On 13 July 1989, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, Secretary-General of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, was assassinated along with his aide Abdullah Ghaderi-Azar and Kurdish mediator Fadel Rasoul in an apartment in Vienna, Austria, during what he believed were secret peace negotiations with Iranian government envoys. The Iranian delegation included intelligence operative Mohammad Jafar Sahraroudi. Despite strong evidence implicating the Iranian agents, Austrian authorities controversially allowed the suspects to leave the country and the case was never brought to trial. The assassination is widely attributed to Iranian intelligence services and is part of a pattern of extraterritorial killings of Iranian dissidents. Ghassemlou's successor, Sadegh Sharafkandi, was also assassinated three years later in Berlin.