25th Anniversary of the Pronouncement of the Mykonos Trial
On April 10, 1997, the German court verdict implicated the top Iranian leadership –the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei; the president at the time, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani; and the foreign minister, Ali Velayati – as those who had ordered the assassination of Dr. Sharafkandi and his aides.
Dr. Sharafkandi was in Berlin to attend the 15th Congress of the Socialist International on September 15-17, 1992. On the evening of September 17, Dr. Sharafkandi met with members of the Iranian opposition in the Mykonos Restaurant in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin.
Aside from Dr. Sharafkandi, Fatah Abdoli and Homayoun Ardalan – PDKI’s representatives in Europe and Germany, respectively – and Nouri Dehkordi, a friend of the party, attended the meeting. Dr. Sharafkandi and his aides had also planned to meet a delegation from the Swedish Social Democratic Party that same evening in the Mykonos Restaurant.
Iranian terrorists in cooperation with assassins from the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah burst into the restaurant and assassinated Dr. Sharafkandi, Abdoli, Ardalan and Dehkordi.
On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Mykonos trial on April 10, 1997, the German and Austrian media commemorated this unprecedented event. Media made this anniversary the headline of their reporting and commented extensively on this terrorist attack by the Islamic regime and the role of its supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Deutschlandfunk website, an official reporting media outlet of the German government, commented extensively on the event.
In an article, journalist Andreas Baum reports on the terrorist attack on Dr. Sharafkani and his accompanying comrades on April 10, 1997, and the Mykonos trial that ensued. He mentions that the Iranian state was immediately under suspicion as a planner and implementer. According to Andreas Baum, Dr. Sharafkandi, Homayun Ardalan, Fatah Abduli and Hossein Dehkordi were invited as guests of the German Social Democratic Party.
According to this official German media, numerous Iranian opposition figures abroad were victims of the terrorist attacks by the Iranian secret service at that time. The author mentions that no western state was ready to take a position about Iran’s state terrorism in order not to risk the commercial interests. Deutschlandfunk emphasizes this position: “The Mykonos court trial ended on April 10, 1997. The court proved that the killers were not just the four people sitting in the dock, but Iranian government officials, including Ali Fallahian, the head of the Iranian Ministry of Information”.
This historic event was also reported in detail by Mena-Watch, an independent Austrian organization with its headquarters in Vienna which reports on the Middle East. The reporter is professor Florian Markl, the former lecturer at the University of Vienna on political science. Professor Markl recalls the assassination attempt on Dr. Ghassemlou and his accompanying comrades in Vienna on July 13, 1989, parallel to the assassination attempt in the Mykonos restaurant on 17. September 1992. He believes that the Austrian government’s inaction and lack of position after the assassination attempt on Dr. Ghassemlou encouraged the Iranian theocrats three years later, this time in Berlin, to perpetrate another terrorist attack, this time on the successor to Dr. Ghassemlou.
Professor Markl concludes that the Mykonos trial put an end to the series of terror attacks against Iranian opposition figures abroad by proving that Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, Ali Fallahian, the head of Iran’s Ministry of Information and Ali Akaber Welayati, then Foreign Minister of Iran were responsible for the attack.
For more information, see:
Deutschlandfunk, Vor 25 Jahren Als das Urteil im Mykonos-Prozess fiel
ein Beitrag von Andreas Baum | 10.04.2022
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/vor-25-jahren-urteil-im-mykonos-prozess-100.html
Deutschlandfunk Podcast: Kalenderblatt – 10. April 2022https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/kalenderblatt-100.html
Heute vor 25 Jahren: Das Urteil im Mykonos-Prozess Florian Markl 10. April 2022 https://www.mena-watch.com/25-jahre-urteil-im-mykonos-prozess/
Kalenderblatt
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