Fadel Rasoul

Fadel Rasoul was a Kurdish-Iraqi academic who served as a mediator in the negotiations between the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) and representatives of the Islamic Republic. On 13 July 1989, Rasoul was shot dead in a Vienna apartment alongside PDKI Secretary-General Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou and PDKI senior official Abdullah Ghaderi-Azar, in what Austrian and later German investigations established was an assassination carried out by Iranian intelligence operatives. Rasoul was present in his capacity as a trusted neutral facilitator. He was the third victim of the Ghassemlou assassination, and his killing underscored that the Islamic Republic was willing to murder even neutral intermediaries to eliminate Kurdish opposition leadership.