Two senior Iranian officials have been accused of killing an oil executive weeks before the Islamic Revolution in 1979 that toppled the US-backed shah and brought the country’s current clerical rulers to power.
Malek Boroujerdi, an Iranian oil official, was shot dead by gunmen in the southwestern city of Ahvaz in December 1978. The perpetrators were never found.
Boroujerdi’s son, Mehrzad, a US-based academic, has accused Ali Shamkhani, a senior adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, and Mohsen Rezaei, a former commander of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), of carrying out the assassination.
Boroujerdi alleges that the clandestine Islamist group Mansouroun -- which Shamkhani and Rezaei belonged to -- planned his father’s killing. American oil executive Paul Grimm was killed in a separate attack on the same day in Ahvaz.
A professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology, Boroujerdi did not provide any proof to back his allegations. RFE/RL, which is officially banned in Iran, reached out to Shamkhani and Rezaei’s offices but did not receive a response.
Boroujerdi’s allegations come as Shamkhani reels from a string of controversies, including the release of a 2024 video showing his daughter’s lavish wedding at a Tehran hotel as well as recent remarks expressing his regret that Iran did not pursue a nuclear weapon in the 1990s.
The 1978 Killings
Boroujerdi, who said he spent decades trying to work out who killed his father, first made the allegations against Shamkhani and Rezaei in a Facebook post on October 21.
In an interview with RFE/RL’s Radio Farda, he said, “People should know who these individuals are, what they have done, and how they climbed the [political] ladder.”
The 1978 killing came as oil workers were on strike to protest the autocratic rule of the shah. Boroujerdi, a director at the state‐owned Iranian National Oil Company, opposed the strikes that were credited with accelerating the fall of the monarch.
His son said that made his father a target for Islamists working to overthrow the shah.
Mansouroun, he said, “had posted in mosques a list of about 10 people, naming my father as an opponent of the strikes who should be eliminated.”
“This wasn’t a lone‑wolf act,” Boroujerdi said. “A terrorist group decided, assigned two people, and neighbors saw two assailants. They even came to the hospital to make sure the job was finished.”
Boroujerdi alleged that Shamkhani and Rezaei shot dead his father. The weapons used in the killing, he alleged, were provided by Mohammad Jahanara.
A member of Mansouroun, Jahanara later became an IRGC commander and was killed during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.
Boroujerdi taught at the Iranian National Oil Company’s technical school in Ahvaz. Rezaei attended the school at the time, although it was not clear if Shamkhani and Jahanara were also enrolled there.
The Figures Named
Shamkhani, born in Ahvaz, was an organizer in Iran’s underground Islamist movements in the 1970s. He then commanded the naval branch of the IRGC before serving as defense minister and secretary of the Supreme National Security Council -- Iran’s equivalent of a national security adviser.
Rezaei became the IRGC’s intelligence chief and then a commander before entering top political posts.
Boroujerdi said he has long suspected that Shamkhani and Rezaei were behind his father’s killing. But he said now was the time to make his allegations public.
“People should know who these individuals are and what they have done,” Boroujerdi said. “That’s why I’m speaking now.”
