Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour
Cleric who co-founded Hezbollah but later joined cause of reform in Iran
Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, cleric. Born: 30 August, 1947 in Tehran, Iran. Died: 7 June, 2021 in Tehran, Iran
Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour, a Shia cleric who as Iran's ambassador to Syria helped found the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and lost his right hand to a book bombing reportedly carried out by Israel, has died at the age of 74.
A close ally of Iran's late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Mr Mohtashamipour in the 1970s formed alliances with Muslim militant groups across the Middle East.
After the Islamic Revolution, he helped found the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in Iran and as ambassador to Syria brought the force into the region to help form Hezbollah.
In his later years, he slowly joined the cause of reformists in Iran, hoping to change the Islamic Republic's theocracy from the inside.
He backed the opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi in Iran's Green movement protests that followed the disputed 2009 re-election of then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The cleric, who wore a black turban that identified him in Shia tradition as a direct
descendant of Islam's Prophet Mohammed, had been living in the Shia holy city of Najaf, Iraq, over the last ten years after the disputed election.
Born in Tehran in 1947, Mr Moht ash amip our metkhomei ni as the cleric remained in exile in Najaf after being expelled from iran by shah mo ham mad Reza Pahlavi.
In the 1970s, he crisscrossed the Middle East speaking to militants groups, helping form an alliance between the future Islamic Republic and the Palestinian Liberation
Organisation. Once arrested by Iraq, Mr Mohtashamipour found his way to Khomeini's residence in exile outside of Paris.
In 1982, Khomeini deployed Mr Mohtashamipour to Syria, then under the rule of dictator Hafez Assad. While ostensibly a diplomat, he oversaw the millions that poured in to fund the Revolutionary Guard's operations in the region.
Lebanon, then dominated by Syria, which deployed tens of thousands of troops there, found itself invaded by Israel in 1982 as Israel pursued the PLO in Lebanon.
Iranian support flowed into the Shia communities occupied by Israel. That helped create a new militant group called Hezbollah, or "the Party of God".
The US blames Hezbollah for the 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people, as well as the later bombing of the US Marine barracks in the Lebanese capital that killed 241 US troops and another attack that killed 58 French paratroopers.
At the time of the assassination attempt on him, Israel's Mossad intelligence agency had received approval from then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir to pursue Mr Mohtashamipour, according to journalist Ronen Bergman.
They chose to send a bomb hidden inside a book described as a "magnificent volume in English about Shia holy places in Iran and Iraq" on Valentine's Day in 1984, Mr Bergman wrote.
The bomb exploded when Mr Mohtashamipour opened the book, tearing away his right hand and two fingers on his left hand.
But he survived, later becoming Iran's interior minister and serving as a hard-line politician in parliament before joining reformists in 2009.