Freelance

In 2010, I wrote a critical blogpost about political assassinations which might be solved, in particular, when asking who benefits. It was one year after the killing of a young woman, Neda Agha Soltan, during the bloody protests after the rigged Iranian election in 2009 which secured President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s second term. I compared two incidents.

“On 2 June 1967, the Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi visits, together with his wife Farah, West-Berlin. They wanted to attend a performance of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” at the Deutsche Oper. There were hundreds of demonstrators, both German students and Iranians protesting against the Shah, an oriental puppet of the western powers, in particular the U.S., usually wearing ludicrous fantasy uniforms. So-called Jubelperser represented the Iranian establishment, members of the Shah’s secret police and terror organization SAVAK. German and Iranian protestors were brutally beaten by these Jubelperser, unhindered by German policemen who only watched them but did not interfere.

Then a shot was fired. A German student, 26-year old Benno Ohnesorg, had been shot in his head from a distance of one or two meters by a German plain-clothes police officer, Karl-Heinz Kurras. Ohnesorg died on the spot. In two separate trials, Kurras was cleared of all charges. It was a huge scandal in the still young Federal Republic of Germany.