Khomeini's opponents strike, killing his President and Prime Minister
The modern mansion in central Tehran that houses Iran's Prime Minister looked like a fortress under siege. Heavily armed Revolutionary Guards and machine gun-equipped Jeeps ringed the building; sharpshooters carrying G-3 automatic rifles were poised behind sandbags on the roof. Inside the compound, on the second story of a modern administrative annex, President Mohammed Ali Raja'i and Prime Minister Mohammed Javad Bahonar were attending a meeting so secret that its time and place had not been made public. The agenda: how to improve security against urban guerrillas, notably the Mujahedine Khalq (People's Crusaders), who had killed some 200 government officials in a concerted assassination campaign over the past two months. A highly trusted security official supposedly delivering classified briefing papers quietly placed a black Samsonite attache case on the table in front of Raja'i and Bahonar and left the room. Moments later, as a conferee opened the case, it exploded.
The blast of the incendiary bomb was so powerful that Raja'i's and Bahonar's charred bodies could be identified only with the help of dental records. Six other men in the room also died, and 14 were injured. The choice of Raja'i and Bahonar was purposeful with a vengeance. Only a week earlier ousted President Abolhassan Banisadr, now living in exile in France, had put the pair at the top of a list of five men whose deaths could bring down the regime of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, the man who led the revolution that toppled Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi just 31 months ago. Raja'i, 47, and Bahonar, also 47, had been in office for 38 days; their deaths came only two months after a massive explosion that killed about 150 people, including the Ayatullah Seyed Mohammed Beheshti, Iran's second most powerful man, at the headquarters of the ruling Islamic Republic Party.
The bomb blast at the Prime Minister's office was a severe, though not necessarily a mortal, blow to the beleaguered regime of the autocratic, 81-year-old Khomeini. But it was the most convincing evidence yet that as Iran's revolution continues to devour itself, the nation may be moving toward civil war.