Information and liaison bulletin - Institut kurde de Paris

HE TIMES july'1S 1989
Kurdish leader and two aides
are murdered in Vienna flat
Dr Abdorrahman Qassemlou,
the leader of the Kurdish
autonomy movement in Iran,
has been found shot dead with
two Kurdish colleagues in a
flat in central Vienna.
Police said a fourth man
was found near the building
with a neck wound. The three
who died in Thursday's attack
were shot in the head from
close range in what looked like
an execution.
The two who died with Dr
Qassemlou, who was 58, were
his chief representative in
Europe, Mr Abdullah Qaderi,
and an Iraqi Kurdish friend,
Dr Fazil Mulla Mahmoud
Rasou!.
Austrian police, who were
on the scene a iew minutes
after th'e shooting at about
8 pm, said the motive appeared
to be political.
Herr Werner Liebhart, the
detective leading the investigation,
said .that the injured
man,-:a, non-Kurdish
Iranian, was helped outside
the flat by a fifth man,
By Hazhir Teimourian
apparently also a non-Kurdish Iou angered Iraq last year by
Iranian. denouncing Baghdad's use of
A Kurd in !he apartment poison gas against the Iraqi
said yesterday that the injured
man had been known to Dr
Kurdish city of Halabja,
where more than 4,000 eivil-
Qassemlou for many months. ians died in March.
Although the shooting hap- The party was foundedin
pcned on the 40th day of Iranian Kurdistan at the end
mourning for Ayatollah Kho- of the Second World War and,
meini in Tehran, observers after a period of repression,
were not convinced there was
any con'neetion.
wasrevived in the turmoil of
the Iranian revolution in
They said that Dr Qassem- 1978. It was disapPointed;
Iou had antagonized a number however, by the new blamic
ofquarters in the Middle East, regime which used the Army
including Iraq which last year' to suppress it.
encouraged a split in his At the height of its power,
Kurdistan Democratic Party the party controlled large arbecause
of his declared readi- eas of western Iran, including
ness to hold negotiations with many Kurdish towns.
Tehran if Iran's five million Althollllh il nrofl'~