March 14, 2000

Leftist Group in Iran Fires Mortars at Military Base

By JOHN F. BURNS

BEIRUT, Lebanon, March 13 -- A day after one of Iran's leading democratic reformers was critically wounded in a shooting on a Tehran street, the Iranian capital was the scene of another attack today when several mortar shells were fired into a residential complex abutting a military base in the capital's northern suburbs.

In messages to news agency offices elsewhere in the Middle East, a radical leftist group based in Iraq, the Mujahedeen Khalq, or People's Holy Warriors, claimed responsibility for the attack, which wounded two civilians, one of whom, a gardener, was reported to have lost both his legs. The group said its target was an adjacent base of the Revolutionary Guards, a powerful military force that is one of the pillars of Iran's system of Islamic rule.

The leftists' claim of responsibility appeared to separate the mortar attack, at least in terms of the likely perpetrators, from the shooting on Sunday of Saeed Hajjarian, a 47-year-old newspaper publisher and close associate of Iran's reformist president, Mohammad Khatami. Before today's attack, the Mujahedeen Khalq denied having anything to do with the shooting of the publisher.

Mr. Hajjarian remained in a coma and on a life support system today at Sina Hospital in Tehran, with what one of the doctors involved described as "irreversible brain damage" resulting from oxygen starvation in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

As Iranians absorbed the shock of the two attacks, it became clear that last month's parliamentary election, far from settling Iran's political future, has in some ways moved the country into a still more volatile period. The attack on Mr. Hajjarian, in particular, appeared to have caused deep anxiety among Iran's 65 million people, whose choices in the parliamentary balloting -- a popular vote of about 70 percent for reform candidates, resulting in a sweep of three-quarters of the decided seats in the 290-seat Parliament -- reflected a deep yearning for relief from two decades of overbearing Islamic rule.

Many Iranians rated the election outcome as potentially the most important change in the political landscape since the Islamic revolution that overthrew Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi in 1979, and saw Mr. Hajjarian, who has been one of the reformers' principal strategists, as a standard-bearer for their hopes. According to leading reformers, few men, if any, have had more influence on the strategies of Mr. Khatami, who won the presidency, an office with sharply limited powers, in a landslide victory of his own in 1997.

But now, the country faces still more uncertainty. Apart from what the attack on Mr. Hajjarian may say about the willingness of Islamic hard-liners to turn to violence in their bid to hang on to power, even the election victory may mean less than seemed at first. Last week, a conservative-dominated supervisory body, the Council of Guardians, threw out the election of three reform candidates who won seats in provincial cities, without any attempt to explain the action.

Reformers were left to worry that further disqualifications may follow.

Beyond this, the prospect of a second round of voting on April 21, to settle more than 60 seats that were thrown to run-off ballots, and a further period of weeks after that before the new Parliament meets, has left the country facing an extended period in which both reformers and conservatives have been left to maneuver and calculate how a new power alignment will work. Iranian political experts, in telephone conversations today, said they viewed the situation as primed for trouble, and feared that the attacks of the last two days might be only a prelude to others.

By choosing the aftermath of the attack on Mr. Hajjarian to mount an attack, the experts said, the Mujahedeen Khalq was not likely to have been motivated by sympathy for the democratic reform movement, which it holds in equal contempt to the Islamic conservatives, seeing both as committed, in different ways, to upholding the Islamic system that the leftists despise. Rather, the experts said, the leftists probably hoped to engender panic and push Iran closer to a political cataclysm that could open new opportunities for the leftists.

One of the theories about the attack on Mr. Hajjarian was that it might be part of a similar strategy, of sowing unrest that could justify Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country's supreme religious leader, to declare a state of emergency and, at the extreme, to annul the parliamentary election. The ayatollah has used his overarching powers to block many of the democratic reforms favored by President Khatami.

But Mr. Hajjarian's associates seemed to think it more likely that the shooting was linked to a scandal that has enveloped the powerful and secretive Intelligence Ministry, which Mr. Hajjarian served as a deputy minister in the 1980's and which, in the last two years, he has confronted with investigative articles in Sobh-e Emrooz, the reformist newspaper of which he was co-founder.

The newspaper broke the scandal that enveloped the Intelligence Ministry after the killing of five leading reformers in Tehran in November and December 1998, as a result of which the ministry, under pressure from Mr. Khatami, admitted that "rogue elements" within its ranks had carried out the killing.

After Mr. Khatami forced the resignation of the intelligence minister last year, Mr. Hajjarian continued to press the case with revelations in Sobh-e Emrooz that suggested that the wrongdoing went back far beyond the 1998 murders, and that the ministry continued to harbor a powerful group of officials with blood on their hands.

This was the background on Sunday, when several news agency reports quoted the intelligence minister, Ali Yunesi, as saying that the ministry knew the identity of Mr. Hajjarian's assailants, a statement the minister did not elaborate.

The statement was left unexplained today as the government conducted a manhunt in Tehran and neighboring cities and towns. Scores of roadblocks were in operation as the police, acting under Interior Ministry orders to "make all possible efforts to identify the attackers," checked all cars, trucks and motorcycles.