Khalil Tahmasebi

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Khalil Tahmasebi (14 February 1924 – 21 January 1955) was an Iranian carpenter and a member of the fundamentalist group Fadayan-e Islam. The group is described as the first Shiite Islamist organization to use terrorism as a primary method of political action. On 7 March 1951, Tahmasebi shot and killed Iranian Prime Minister Ali Razmara while Razmara attended a memorial at the Shah Mosque, and Tahmasebi was arrested at the scene. The New York Times called him a religious fanatic. In 1952, during Prime Minister Mosaddegh's government, Parliament freed him, quashed his death sentence, and he was praised as a "Soldier of Islam." After the 1953 coup, he was re-arrested and tried for Razmara's murder, and he was executed by firing squad in 1955 at age 30.