Anti-Regime Iranian Kurd Leader Slain

Gunmen burst into a meeting and assassinated Iranian Kurdish opposition leader Abdul Rahman Qassemlou and two other exiled Kurdish activists and wounded a man with an Iranian diplomatic passport, police in Vienna said Friday.

“The murders were politically motivated,” Police Chief Werner Liebhart told a news conference.

He said the three killers, who later fled, burst into an apartment in central Vienna where the four men had held talks Thursday evening and immediately opened fire.

Qassemlou, 59, was secretary general of the pro-Iraqi Democratic Party of Kurdistan. Also killed was his deputy, Abdullah Ghaderi-Azar, 37, and an Iraqi Kurd, Fadel Mala Mahmoud Rasoul, 38, who represented a separate Kurdish group, police said.

A fourth man, who held an Iranian passport, fled to the street outside the apartment with a gunshot wound in the jaw. He was hospitalized and unable to talk to police.

There were no claims of responsibility for the deaths.

Iran Blames ‘Enemies’

The Iranian Embassy in Vienna issued a statement Friday night that blamed “enemies of Iran” for the killings and said it had sent a delegation to meet with Kurdish leaders in Vienna to discuss “peaceful solutions.” The Iraqi Embassy declined to comment on the shootings.

In Iran, independent sources who declined to be named said Qassemlou, who has led the Iranian Kurds against Tehran for more than 20 years, had been negotiating a settlement with the new Tehran leadership that emerged after the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini last month.

Qassemlou’s guerrillas seized control of a large part of Iranian Kurdistan after the 1979 Islamic revolution, but many were pushed across the border into Iraq after a massive government offensive in 1980.

A total of at least 20 million Kurds are believed to live in Iran, Iraq, the Soviet Union, Syria, and Turkey.