
Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur (1947-7 June 2021) was an Iranian Shia cleric and reformist politician who served as Interior Minister from 19 August 1985 to 3 August 1989, succeeding Ali Akbar Nategh-Nouri and preceding Abdollah Nouri.
Biography[]
Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur was born in Tehran, Iran in 1947, and he was educated in Najaf, Iraq, where he became a student of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and accompanied him during his exile in Iraq and France. He and Mohammad Montazeri later co-founded what would become the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in the late 1970s, assisting liberation movements in Muslim countries. Following the Iranian Revolution, Mohtashamipur served as ambassador to Syria from 1982 to 1996, playing a pivotal role in co-founding Hezbollah in Lebanon and bringing in crates of material from Iran to supply Hezbollah during the Lebanese Civil War. As a co-founder of Hezbollah, he was supposedly involved in the 1983 United States embassy bombing, the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings, and the 1984 United States embassy annex bombing. In 1984, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir personally authorized an assassination attempt against Mohtashamipur, who lost his right hand after receiving a package and opening a book loaded with explosives. Mohtashamipur went on to serve as Interior Minister of Iran from 1985 to 1989, but he was fired by President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani amid a downgrading in Iran's support for radical Khomeinism. He served in the Islamic Consultative Assembly from 1989 to 1992 and from 2000 to 2004 as a member of the Association of Combatant Clerics. While Mohtashamipur was a strong opponent of Western influence in the Muslim world and of Israel, he affiliated himself with the reformist camp of Iranian politics. He died of COVID-19 in 2021 at the age of 74.