Kurds Claim Tehran Agents Killed Iranian

Kurds Claim Tehran Agents Killed Iranian

Associated Press

August 27, 1989

LARNACA, Cyprus (AP) _ Two gunmen killed an Iranian and seriously wounded another in an attack that the Kurdish Communist Party of Iran blamed Sunday on Iranian government agents.

A police statement said Bahman Javadi, an Iranian with a Swedish passport, died in the hospital a few hours after he was shot in the head Saturday night in the southern Cypriot coastal resort of Larnaca.

Javadi, 33, was killed as he walked back to his hotel with his mother and sister and four other Iranians, the statement said.

One of the four, Yussef Rashidzadeh, 40, was shot in the chest and is reported hospitalized in critical condition.

Stelios Karayias, head of the Criminal Investigation Department, told reporters he did not know the motive for the attack, but did not rule out politics.

He said police are searching for the gunmen.

Javadi arrived in Cyprus from Sweden on Monday. Rashidzadeh arrived from Iran the following day, accompanied by Javadi’s mother and sister. Javadi had been trying to obtain Swedish visas for them, Karayias said.

The Kurdish Communist Party of Iran said in a telex sent to The Associated Press in Cyprus from Norsborg, Sweden, that Javadi was one of its activists.

The statement said Javadi, ″known as Gholam Keshavarz, who went to Larnaca to meet his mother, has been shot dead there by the agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran.″

The Larnaca attack follows the July 14 assassination of Abdul Rahman Qassemlou, leader of the rebel Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran, and two other Kurds in a Vienna hotel.

Qassemlou and the other two Kurds had been meeting with Iranian officials to negotiate an amnesty for Kurdish rebels fighting Tehran for an autonomous homeland in northwest Iran.

Kurdish Democrats blamed the Iranian government for the killings. But Iran blamed the assassinations on the Iraq-based Mujahedeen Khalq, the main Iranian opposition movement, to prevent a reconciliation between Tehran and the Kurds.