(7 of 9)
In the back room of Berlin's Mykonos Restaurant on Sept. 17, 1992, eight men were feasting on lamb and stuffed grape leaves. The diners, members of various Iranian opposition movements, were in town for a convention of the Socialist International. The senior member of the group was Sadegh Sharafkandi, 54, who had succeeded the murdered Qassemlou as head of the Kurdish opposition.
At 11 p.m., Iranian dissident Parviz Dastmalchi glanced up at what he assumed was a late arrival coming to join the gathering. Suddenly someone shouted in Farsi, "You sons of whores!" and two gunmen opened fire. Dastmalchi threw himself backward under a table and played dead. The shooting lasted no more than a minute, then the gunmen fled in a dark blue BMW. Sharafkandi and two associates were killed instantly, and a third man died shortly afterward in the hospital.
German authorities quickly rounded up five of the eight suspected perpetrators and have had them on trial in Berlin since last October. Three others are still at large. The alleged leader, Kazem Darabi, a 34-year-old importer-exporter, worked for years as the German-based link between Tehran and the Lebanese Hizballah, according to the German prosecutors. The indictment identifies him as "an agent of the Iranian intelligence service VEVAK" and a Revolutionary Guards member. His assignment, assert German prosecutors, was to "liquidate" the Kurd leader as part of a "persecution strategy of the Iranian minister for intelligence and security against the Iranian opposition." The other four defendants, all Lebanese, are veterans of the Hizballah and Amal militia.
The evidence against the five is overwhelming. The getaway car contained the fingerprints of a defendant. One of the weapons recovered from a sports bag left in a parking lot was flecked with blood from a victim. It also bore fingerprints of another defendant, whose prints were found in an apartment Darabi kept in Berlin.
Whether prosecutors will succeed in proving links to Tehran officials is less certain, however. A police officer has testified that a top aide of Chancellor Helmut Kohl ordered a key report to be removed from the evidence file. The exact contents of the report are unclear, but the testimony has deepened suspicions that Iran has been pressuring the German government to limit the Mykonos case to keep intelligence matters out. However, German intelligence chief Bernd Schmidbauer, the country's main liaison with Iran, has repeatedly denied that Tehran has exerted any undue influence or that the missing report contains crucial information. Iran's ambassador to Germany, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, "categorically ((denies)) any connection between Darabi and the Iranian state" and blames the killings on "assassins from the outside, who want to sabotage Iran."
The case has hardly ruffled Tehran's relations with Bonn. Last October Intelligence Minister Fallahian visited Bonn for private meetings with Schmidbauer. The government tried to keep the meeting a secret, but Fallahian brazenly called a press conference to "demonstrate that contrary to the public statements of the German government, we maintain good relations with Bonn." Shortly afterward, Schmidbauer testified to the close ties between the two countries by telling a parliamentary committee that German intelligence had recently delivered a $60,000 computer-training project to its Iranian counterpart.