Mystery Killings of Activists Raise Fear in Iran

The fifth mysterious killing of a government foe in just four weeks raised feelings of dread in Iran on Sunday, with speculation that something like an extrajudicial death squad may have emerged with a murderous agenda to defend Islamic rule.

The most recent slaying was confirmed when the body of writer-translator Mohammed Jafar Pouyandeh was identified late Saturday by family members, according to news services.

The family had feared the worst ever since Pouyandeh, 45, vanished Wednesday somewhere between his office and his home. His body was discovered under a bridge in a Tehran suburb, apparently strangled. He was still wearing his watch and ring, suggesting that robbery was not a motive for the attack. Pouyandeh disappeared the same day that the body of poet Mohammed Mokhtari was found, also apparently suffocated, with bruises around the neck.

A week earlier, Majid Sharif, another dissident writer, was found dead under what fellow dissidents have called suspicious circumstances. And in late November, Dariush Foruhar and his wife, Parvanjeh, activists in an anti-regime nationalist and secular political party, were found stabbed to death in their home.

Adding to the general apprehension in Iran, an author who has been critical of the regime, Pirouz Davani, has been reported missing.

Residents of the capital have described anxiety mounting with each new slaying. The killings are also putting pressure on the administration of President Mohammad Khatami to prove that it can protect other government critics who may be in danger and can find and arrest the unknown assailants.

“Everyone is wondering and talking about it,” said Mohammed Ghaed, a magazine publisher in Tehran. “People ask themselves: What can the government do? Who is going to stop whom? And how far are ‘they’ going to go?”

A statement by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which is controlled by Khatami loyalists, suggested Sunday that the killers mean to strike at the liberalization that has been underway in Iran since Khatami took office in August 1997.

“Behind this saga, we can see there are plots and anti-revolutionary subversive acts, and their purpose is nothing but to discourage people and weaken the regime and strike a blow at the new atmosphere in the Islamic Republic,” the ministry said.

The killings have come during a long-running power struggle between supporters of Khatami and the conservative traditionalists who dominate parliament and the judiciary. The latter associate themselves with the nation’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Although Khatami appears to retain great popularity with the voters who elected him in a landslide in May 1997, there have been signs that the conservatives have grown bolder in their efforts to defend their more rigid interpretation of Islamic rule.

In September, Iran’s Revolutionary Court jailed four senior journalists and closed the country’s leading independent newspaper, Tous, for allegedly questioning the authority of the supreme leader. Earlier, acting on complaints from parliament, a conservative judge-prosecutor convicted a key Khatami ally, Tehran Mayor Gholamhussein Karbaschi, on corruption charges. Karbaschi had played a major role in organizing Khatami’s successful election campaign.

The conservative backlash seems to have stalled Khatami’s efforts to bring about greater openness in Iran and a better relationship between his nation and Western countries.

At the start of 1998, Khatami made a cautious overture to the American people, including an endorsement of increased cultural and touristic contacts between Americans and Iranians. But he has not managed to build upon that opening, and to some extent it has been undermined by the actions of hard-liners at home.

On Nov. 21, a gang of unidentified men armed with crowbars attacked a minibus carrying a delegation of 13 American business executives outside their Tehran hotel. The men systematically beat out the bus’ windows, and no police arrived until after the attack. The Americans left Iran the next day.

Although there is no obvious connection, the series of killings began the same weekend as the bus attack, with the slaying of Foruhar and his wife. What is puzzling to some in Tehran is that the victims were not especially prominent on the Iranian political scene, were not in the forefront of dissent and did not seem to pose any significant threat to Iran’s system of clerical rule.

Foruhar had been a longtime spokesman for a small secular and nationalist political party that was banned but unofficially tolerated. Pouyandeh and Mokhtari were among six writers called in for questioning in October by the Revolutionary Court when they tried to reactivate a banned writers guild, in the latest of several attempts since the 1979 revolution to bring the guild back into existence.

“There is a sort of amazement at the kind of victims. These people were in general in the background,” said publisher Ghaed. “If this is some kind of saber-rattling . . . these people were on the margins.”

Ordinary Iranians are left wondering where it will all end.

“People are confused,” said Shirzad Bozorgmehr, editor of the English-language Iran News. “As far as the man in the street is concerned, these murders don’t make sense.”

Bozorgmehr said he doubted that Khatami’s conservative political enemies would resort to killing and risk the negative publicity and public anger that would ensue. That suggests to Bozorgmehr that the slayings might represent a small clique of radicals at work.

“Maybe it is an extremist group outside the system,” he said. “Maybe this group feels [the victims] were writing and saying things that they shouldn’t.”

He said the killers might be compared to death squads that have operated in the past in Latin America or to rogue officers in various countries who have taken the law into their own hands during times of political turmoil.

Iranian Deputy Interior Minister Mostafa Tajzadeh, in a newspaper interview, expressed concern that there might be a larger sinister purpose behind the attacks--not only to silence a few dissidents but to undermine the whole range of reforms that Khatami has been trying to introduce.

“Between security and any other values, people will definitely choose security,” Tajzadeh told the liberal newspaper Zan.

“That is why they say that after anarchy, there must come dictatorship, because anarchy will make society thirsty for security, and people will pay any price to get that security, even if they lose their legitimate rights and freedoms.”