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.
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.