(2 of 5)
Although no group publicly admitted responsibility for the bombing, a Mujahedin leader told TIME last week that it was the work of his organization, the very group Raja'i and Bahonar were discussing as they were killed. Of the dozen factions that oppose Khomeini, the Mujahedin have emerged as the best organized and the most likely to bid for power in the event of the regime's collapse. Their leader, Massoud Rajavi, 34, is hardly known abroad—unlike Banisadr, whose escape to France was engineered by the Mujahedin. But with thousands of armed men at his command inside Iran, Rajavi poses the most serious single threat to Khomeini's Islamic Republic. The attack on the Prime Minister's office confirmed that the Mujahedin have penetrated the highest levels of the governing hierarchy, including its security apparatus. Indeed, late last week another bomb killed Iran's general revolutionary prosecutor, Hojjatoleslam Ali Qoddousi, in his office near Tehran's Qasr Prison. Not even Khomeini is safe. Last month the guerrillas left a powerful bomb in his house at Jamaran, a village on the northern outskirts of Tehran, with the fuse removed to make certain that the device would not explode. In an attached note, the Mujahedin warned Khomeini to surrender.
The Islamic regime moved swiftly to fill the vacuum created by the two earlier deaths. Majlis (parliament) Speaker Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Chief Justice Ayatullah Moussavi Ardabeli jointly assumed the presidency until new elections are held, at the latest by Oct. 19, to fill the vacancy. They named another cleric and Khomeini intimate, Interior Minister Ayatullah Mohammed Reza Mahdavi Kani, 50, as Prime Minister; as one of his first tasks Kani pledged to improve security. The three, who complete Banisadr's five-man hit list, also vowed to press on with a purge aimed at eliminating their opposition. The Iranian Foreign Ministry issued a statement blaming the U.S. and Iraq for the attack, and demonstrators chanted, "Death to America, the Great Satan!" as the two coffins were carried through Tehran's streets to Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery.
Khomeini conceded that the loss of his President and Prime Minister was "difficult to bear," but he insisted that his regime would survive. "Our nation will not be shaken at all," he declared in a sermon delivered at the Hoseiniyeh Jamaran mosque north of Tehran. Though Khomeini asked his followers not to be "hasty and un-Islamic" in their treatment of suspects, his admonitions fell on deaf ears: last week Islamic tribunals sent 138 more opponents, including some teen-age girls, before firing squads, raising the total number of political executions since Banisadr's ouster on June 22 to nearly 900.