Biker gangs and hired hands: how Iran is increasingly outsourcing its terrorism campaigns
Experts see potential hallmarks of Iranian involvement in firebombing of four ambulances in Golders Green on Monday
To some it was the moment the mask slipped. Wearing an open-necked white shirt, Mohsen Rafighdoost, former minister of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was filmed last March fondly reminiscing with an interviewer from the Tehran-based Didban Iran news website about the assassinations he had organised around Europe.
There was Prince Shahriar Shafiq, the last Shah of Iran’s 34-year-old nephew, who was shot twice in the head outside his mother’s home in Paris in 1979.
Then there was the Shah’s final commander-in-chief, Gen Gholam Ali Oveissi, also shot dead in Paris, in 1984.
Rafighdoost explained with a chuckle that he had additionally ordered the murder of Shapour Bakhtiar, the final prime minister under the Shah, who was killed in his Parisian home in 1991; and the stabbing to death a year later of Fereydoun Farrokhzad, a dissident Iranian artist.
“Usually the Basque guys,” Rafighdoost said of the separatist terror group he commissioned to carry out the murders. “They were performing and no one was bothering them.”