Killing One's Enemies

A slender man dressed in a gray postal uniform rang the doorbell of an elegant $250,000 house in the Washington suburb of Bethesda, Md., one morning last week. He brought two special delivery packages for the occupant, Ali Akbar Tabatabai, 49. As the balding Iranian bent over to examine them, the "mailman" killed him with three shots from a 9-mm pistol concealed in a sheaf of envelopes.

Tabatabai had been a popular figure around Washington in his days as press attache at the Shah's embassy. After the fall of the regime, he organized the Iran Freedom Foundation, a vocal anti-Khomeini group that denounced the Ayatullah's regime with leaflets churned out in Tabatabai's basement. The police were quick to launch a man hunt after an eyewitness culled through 400 photos of Muslim militants.

The prime suspect: Daoud Salahuddin, 29, believed to be a security guard at the Iranian interest section at the Algerian consulate in Washington. Although Salahuddin was born David Belfield in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., he had taken a Muslim name about five years ago and had been living at Islamic House, a home for Muslim students and a center for anti-Shah activists. He had been arrested briefly in New York City last Nov. 4--the date the U.S. hostages were seized in Tehran--for having draped an anti-Shah banner from the Statue of Liberty. Police arrested a postal employee, Tyrone Frazier, 31, who admitted that he had accepted $200 from Salahuddin for the use of his Jeep, and also Horace Butler, 35, another alleged accomplice.

Logically, in light of the previous week's assassination attempt against former Prime Minister Bakhtiar in a Paris suburb, the Washington slaying aroused speculation that the long arm of revolutionary vengeance had reached all the way from Iran. Police officials, so far, have no concrete evidence to link the crime to Tehran. But one thing is certain: Salahuddin was a devout believer in Khomeini's gospel of killing one's enemies.

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