According to western intelligence sources and European think-tanks, Iranian agents or Iranian-backed radical groups’ terrorism in Europe goes back to 1979, when the Islamic Republic was formed. The attacks escalated in mid-eighties. Following are some of the attacks.
December 1979: Iranian agents assassinate the nephew of the Shah, Shahriar Shafiq, in Paris.
1980: A five-person ‘hit squad’ attempts to murder the last prime minister before the 1979 Islamic revolution, Shapour Bakhtiar, in Paris. The assassins failed to kill Bakhtiar, instead murdering a policewoman and Bakhtiar’s female neighboyr. In 1991, three Iranian agents murder Bakhtiar in his Paris home.
February 1984: General Oveisi, the shah’s former martial law administrator, and his brother, are shot dead in Paris.
May 12: A car laden with explosives detonates near an Iraqi Airways ticket office in Nicosia, Cyprus. Iraqi dissident groups supported by Iran claim credit.
July: Three radical Lebanese Shiites hijack an Air France plane flying from Frankfurt to Paris and divert it to Tehran.
August: A gunman attacks a Kuwaiti businessman in a Spanish resort town, and kills his driver.
September: A Saudi engineer is assassinated in the same town. Islamic Jihad callers claim responsibility for both attacks.
December: Bombs are found under the cars of four Iraqi diplomats in Athens, Greece. A Greek expert dies while trying to defuse one of the bombs. An Iranian-backed Iraqi opposition group claims responsibility.
July 13, 1989: Iranian intelligence agents in Vienna assassinate Abdul Rahman Gassemlou, secretary-general of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan. Gassemlou was visiting Austria to negotiate with Iranian officials on Kurdish rights and self-governance.
1990: Iranian assassins murder Professor Kazem Rajavi, a human rights advocate and the elder brother of Iranian opposition leader Massoud Rajavi, in Switzerland. In late 1992, two men implicated in Rajavi’s murder are apprehended in Paris. Switzerland requests their extradition, but in December 1993, France sends both men back to Iran, citing “reasons connected to our national interests”. It was later revealed that Iran had threatened terror attacks on French targets if France chose to extradite the fugitives — threats that France took “with great seriousness”.
September 1992: Gassemlou’s successor, Sadegh Sharafkandi, and three of his associates are assassinated at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin. A German court begins a trial of Iranian suspects in October 1993, and finds four Iranian officials guilty of the murders in April 1997.
— Compiled from different websites and online documents
