On a sweltering August afternoon in 1991, three dark-haired men approached an ivy-covered villa in the Paris suburb of Suresnes. It was the home of Shahpour Bakhtiar, 76, exiled former Prime Minister of Iran and a leader of the anti- Khomeini opposition. Since fleeing Tehran in 1979, Bakhtiar had been one of the most closely guarded men in France, watched over by paramilitary police 24 hours a day.
The arrival of the three men raised no alarm, since one was Farydoun Boyerahmadi, 38, a Bakhtiar aide and confidant. He was bringing two friends, Ali Vakili Rad, 32, and Mohammed Azadi, 31, to meet the famous exile. The guards at the door collected the visitors' passports, frisked the men, then waved them inside.
Bakhtiar and his personal secretary, Fouroush Katibeh, greeted the guests in a ground-floor salon. As soon as Katibeh went to the kitchen to make tea, one of the visitors leaped at Bakhtiar and, according to the autopsy report, struck a "mortal blow" to the throat. The secretary was similarly dispatched. With two knives grabbed from the kitchen, the assailants hacked at their victims' throats, chests and arms so savagely that a knife blade was broken. An hour after arriving, Boyerahmadi calmly collected the trio's passports, and the men drove off in an orange BMW. The guards failed to notice that Vakili's and Azadi's shirts were drenched in blood.
The vicious attack touched off one of the most intensive murder investigations in French history. Conducted by Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, 50, a dogged investigator of terrorist activities, the probe followed a winding trail that led through Switzerland and Turkey to the highest levels of the Tehran government. The judge completed his work last month by turning over 18 volumes of documents to the Paris Appeals Court. This week judges will hear arguments from the prosecutor and defense attorneys, and must decide by April 7 whether to charge three key suspects in the case with "criminal conspiracy" and "complicity." If convicted, they risk a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Like another trial of accused Iran-backed assassins now under way in Berlin, the Bakhtiar case will in effect put the Tehran government in the dock. Bruguiere's investigation appears to have assembled an unprecedented body of evidence linking Iranian officials to the murder of a political opponent abroad. "This case," says a French official familiar with the investigation, "marks the first time that we have so many proofs of the implication of the state in an operation of this importance." Defense lawyers contend that the evidence against their clients is flimsy, and Iranian officials vehemently deny any involvement in this or other foreign assassinations.