Aug. 30 (Shahrivar. 8), The National Day of Fight Against Terrorism, is the time to remember President Rajaei and Prime Minister Bahonar who were martyred in a bombing by the U.S-backed MEK (Mojahedin-e Khalq) terrorist group. The bomb, which claimed lives of other officials as well, went off at the office of Islamic Republican Party in Tehran in 1981.
According to survivors’ accounts, the bomb was set off when one of the victims opened a briefcase which was carried inside by Massoud Kashmiri, a security official at the Islamic Republican Party. The assassination came 39 days after Rajaei won the votes of the majority of Iranians in an early election and had become the second president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, after Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, who had fled to Europe after being voted out by the parliament. The MEK was established in the 1960s to express a mixture of Marxism and Islamism. It launched bombing campaigns against the Shah, continuing after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, against the Islamic Republic. Iran accuses the group of being responsible for 17,000 deaths. Despite assassinating 1000s Iranians & fighting alongside Saddam, MEK is sheltered by the U.S. and some countries in the EU.
Based in Iraq at the time, MEK members were armed and equipped by Iraq to fight against Iran alongside the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during a war which lasted for 8 years.
In 2012, despite the atrocities committed by this terrorist group, the U.S. State Department removed the MEK (also called MKO) from its list of designated terrorist organizations under intense lobbying by groups associated to Saudi Arabia and other regimes opposed to Iran.
A few years ago, MEK members were relocated from their Camp Ashraf in Iraq’s Diyala Province to Camp Hurriyet (Camp Liberty), a former U.S. military base in Baghdad, and were later sent to Albania.
From Albania, the group has launched an intensive disinformation campaign against Iran under the leadership of the Trump administration.
Ayatollah Khamenei (The Supreme Leader of Iran):
"Today, we consider Martyr Rajaei and Martyr Bahonar to be two models possessing these lofty and valuable concepts, i.e. piety and justice. Indeed, what made them move forward - and we witnessed this up close - was love of justice, revolutionary values and the like. It is necessary for you to commemorate National Week of Government in their memory and to associate yourselves with those great personalities. May their memories be commemorated, God willing." Aug 26, 2007
"In my opinion, their faith in our path and our goals -the goals Imam Khomeini had laid out and the Islamic Republic is the embodiment of these goals- is a very important indicator. The same is true of their purity and their spirit of rendering services. They did not really rest day and night and they always engaged in rendering services. Another characteristic that they had was their spirit of being in contact with and listening to the people up close.
They were not looking to enrich themselves through the positions they had. This is a very important point. We should not think that because we have a position, we should use it as a tool to build our future. This is what exists among officials in many countries in the world. They use their positions as a tool to become a member of the management board in some companies and to have a share in some sensitive financial institutions. Commitment to the principles of the Revolution and the like was one of the characteristics of these two personalities. We should pay attention to such characteristics and coordinate our work with them." Aug 27, 2015