Revisiting the Case of the Assassination of Iranian Opposition Figures in Mykonos

32 years ago, on the evening of September 17, 1992, two armed men, one with a Uzi submachine gun and the other with a handgun, entered the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin and opened fire on a group of Iranian opposition members. In this terrorist operation, four people were killed: Mohammad Sadegh Sharafkandi, Secretary-General of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan; Fattah Abdali, representative of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan in Europe; Homayoun Ardalan, representative of this party in Germany; and Noorollah Dehkordi, translator and friend of Sharafkandi. Aziz Ghafari, the restaurant owner, was also injured in the incident. The perpetrators of the killings were arrested by German security forces; four Lebanese and one Iranian, named Kazem Darabi, who coordinated the operation. After 146 court sessions and hearing the testimonies of 176 witnesses, the court, known as the Mykonos trial, announced its verdict, sentencing Kazem Darabi to life imprisonment on April 15, 1997. The court also identified the masterminds of the murders as a group of high-ranking officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran who had formed a committee called the 'Special Affairs Committee of the Islamic Republic.' According to the court's announcement, this committee consisted of Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran; Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the then-President; Ali Fallahian, the then-Minister of Intelligence; Ali Akbar Velayati, the then-Minister of Foreign Affairs; Mohammad Reyshahri, former Minister of Intelligence; Mohsen Rezai, the then-commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; Reza Seyfollahi, former commander of the Intelligence Protection of the Law Enforcement Force; and Ayatollah Khazali, a former member of the Guardian Council. The Iranian government denied all allegations, and eventually, Kazem Darabi was released from prison on December 11, 2007, and returned to Tehran. 'The Year of Thirty' is the title of a documentary produced and broadcast by Radio Farda in 2022 to mark the 30th anniversary of this incident and to revisit it. In the documentary 'The Year of Thirty,' several witnesses of the Mykonos trial and one of the survivors of this attack are interviewed, while Wilhelm Dietl, a journalist and German security-intelligence expert, and Norbert Sigmund, a journalist and researcher, also discuss this incident. The documentary also includes parts of an exclusive interview with Hossein Mousavian, the then-Iranian ambassador to Germany, conducted by Radio Farda in 2020 regarding the murders of opposition figures in Germany. The Mykonos court identified the leaders of the Islamic Republic as the masterminds of this assassination attempt, but has this ruling prevented the Islamic Republic from attacking its opponents abroad? This documentary, produced by Farhang Ghavimi and Shahryar Siyami, can be watched here on the Radio Farda website or on YouTube.