Mykonos assassination

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Memorial plaque for the victims of the Berlin Mykonos attack
Memorial plaque reconstructed in 2017 for the first plaque destroyed in 2017, photo from April 2019

The attack on September 17, 1992 in the Greek restaurant Mykonos became known as the Mykonos assassination attempt . In this bar on Prager Strasse in Berlin-Wilmersdorf four Iranian- Kurdish politicians in exile were shot dead on behalf of the Iranian secret service VEVAK , and another guest and the innkeeper were seriously injured.

Victim

Those killed were the Secretary General of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan ( DPK-I ), Sadegh Sharafkandi , the representatives of the party classified as social democratic in France , Fattah Abdoli , the representative of the party in Germany , Homayoun Ardalan , and the interpreter Nouri Dehkordi . You were guests at a congress of the Socialist International at the invitation of Björn Engholm to visit Berlin.

Perpetrator

The mastermind behind the attack was the Iranian Kazem Darabi , who has lived in Germany since the early 1980s . He spied out opponents of the Tehran regime in Germany and headed the Berlin branch of Hezbollah . The murderers met to make arrangements in a mosque in Berlin-Kreuzberg and in Darabi's apartment on Detmolder Strasse. The fight of the victims was by the then Minister of Intelligence and Security Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ali Fallahian been announced after its predecessor, the Office of the Presidency of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan , Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou was murdered in Vienna in 1989 had been. Germany, Switzerland and Argentina had arrest warrants against Ali Fallahian wanted by Interpol for alleged murder. Mohammed Atris and two other Lebanese convicted by the Supreme Court are included in Hezbollah. Obviously, Iranian authorities hired Hezbollah members or sympathizers for their purposes, without the leadership of the Lebanese Shiite militia in Beirut always being informed.

process

After three and a half years of trial, the Berlin Court of Appeal , chaired by Frithjof Kubsch, sentenced Darabi and the Lebanese Abbas Rhayel to life imprisonment for murder with particularly serious guilt. The Lebanese Youssef Amin and Mohamed Atris were convicted of aiding and abetting murder. The most important person and leader of the operation was the Iranian Abdol-Raham Bani-Haschemi , who was known to those involved only under the pseudonym Sharif . Immediately after the crime, he fled to Iran via Turkey and was able to avoid prosecution for a long time. The judgments made it clear that the murder order had been issued by the state authorities of Iran and that the chief legal scholar Seyyed Alī Chāmene'ī and the former President Alī-Akbar Hāschemī Rafsanjānī had been informed of the attack in advance.

The process explored the spheres of influence of the executive and jurisdiction in the Federal Republic because - according to Norbert Siegmund - the Federal German government - in particular the then Minister of State in the Federal Chancellery Bernd Schmidbauer  - initially wanted to keep Iran out of the process for political and economic reasons and therefore wanted to keep conclusive information held back. Court and the representative of the Federal Prosecutor's Office , Bruno Jost . were only able to introduce existing but unusable information into the process as evidence of state terrorism, in some cases only with artificial devices - according to Norbert Siegmund . The then Federal Prosecutor General Alexander von Stahl saw the process as the initial spark for his subsequent dismissal. For the first time in the history of the Federal German judiciary, an indictment by the Attorney General was sent to various ministries before signing.

Committee of Inquiry

In the spring of 1993, the Berlin House of Representatives set up a committee of inquiry into the Mykonos assassination attempt to clarify for almost two and a half years why the later main defendant Kazem Darabi had not been monitored by the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution before the bloody attack.

Plaque

Since April 20, 2004, a memorial plaque at the site of the attack has been commemorating the victims, which led to protests from Iran beforehand. The then mayor of Tehran and later President of Iran, Mahmud Ahmadineschad , wrote a letter to his Berlin counterpart Klaus Wowereit in 2004 , in which he described the plaque as an insult to Iran.

Release of two perpetrators

On October 11, 2007, the Federal Prosecutor General at the Federal Court of Justice ruled that the assassin and chief mastermind Kazem Darabi, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment , would be released in December 2007  after 15 years of imprisonment , despite the particular severity of the guilt determined by the court Iran imprisoned Donald Klein is assumed. A project that Iran had tried to achieve in 1999 with the arrest of the Hamburg businessman Helmut Hofer. The deportation Darabi on December 10, 2007. The day after he protested in Tehran, where he was received as a hero with a wreath of flowers, again his innocence.

literature

  • Norbert Siegmund: The Mykonos Trial. A terrorist trial influenced by foreign policy and secret services. Germany's uncritical dialogue with Iran . LIT, Münster 2001, ISBN 3-8258-6135-X .

Web links

Commons : Mykonos Assassination  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

References and comments

  1. ↑ morgenpost.de
  2. ^ Attacks on Israelis Parallels to other incidents . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , September 5, 2012
  3. ↑ Mykonos: Great Day for the Gentle Judge . In: Berliner Zeitung , April 10, 1997
  4. ↑ the Mykonos judgment ( memento of the original from July 25, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 438 Be PDF @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.iranhrdc.org
  5. ↑ File number: [1] 2 StE 2/93 [19/93]
  6. ^ Norbert Siegmund: The Mykonos process. A terrorist trial influenced by foreign policy and secret services. Germany's uncritical dialogue with Iran . LIT, Münster 2001, ISBN 3-8258-6135-X . The content of the publication was the subject of the disputation on October 20, 2000 , as a dissertation entitled The Mykonos Process in the Shadow of German Iran Policy at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the Free University of Berlin. The 175-page appendix contains numerous original documents as facsimiles
  7. ↑ Michael Stoessinger: Trade with the executioners. Die Zeit, January 7, 1994, accessed May 15, 2020 .
  8. ^ Report of the committee of inquiry to clarify possible omissions in the security authorities in connection with the murder case Mykonos. Berlin House of Representatives DS 12/5949, September 6, 1995, accessed on May 14, 2020 .
  9. ↑ a b Mykonos assassin Darabi is released . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , October 11, 2007.
  10. ↑ Christoph Gunkel: hostage in Iran: severely punished . In: Die Zeit , January 17, 2018, accessed April 26, 2018.
  11. ↑ "Mykonos" assassin wants to prove his innocence with the book .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Agence France-Presse , December 11, 2007.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.koeln.de  

Coordinates: 52 ° 29 ′ 41.3 ″  N , 13 ° 20 ′ 2.7 ″  E