In the 1980s, he was the face of pro-Iranian terrorism in France. Lebanese political activist Anis Naccache, who tried to assassinate Chapour Bakhtiar, the last prime minister of the Shah of Iran in 1980, died on Monday February 22, in Damascus, at the age of 70, from the coronavirus.
It was through the Palestinian cause, like many Lebanese of his generation, that Anis Naccache, born in 1951 in a Sunni household in Beirut, got his start in politics. As a teenager, he joined the ranks of Fatah, the party of Yasser Arafat, which transformed the refugee camps scattered around the country of the cedar into the rear base of the anti-Israel guerrillas.
While pursuing architectural studies, Anis Naccache trained in the handling of the Kalashnikov, participated in his first armed actions and was noticed by his leaders. This is how he took part alongside the famous Carlos, head of the pro-Palestinian terrorism of the 1970s and 1980s, in the hostage-taking of the ministers of the OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), in Vienna. , in 1975.
Fiasco
Three years later, he and the fedayeen faced the first Israeli invasion in southern Lebanon. In 1979, when the Shah’s regime collapsed, he put himself at the service of the Iranian Islamists. Like other Lebanese Fatah militants, such as Imad Moughnieh, the future mastermind of Hezbollah’s external operations, he considers the new power in place in Tehran as the only credible counterweight to American-Israeli domination in the Middle East.
Converted to Shiism, close to Ahmad Khomeyni, the son of the Guide of the Revolution, and perfectly French-speaking, Anis Naccache is responsible for eliminating “The traitor Bakhtiar”, who lives in Neuilly-sur-Seine. The operation, carried out on July 18, 1980, turned into a fiasco. Naccache and his acolytes, who tried to pass themselves off as journalists, were arrested after a long shootout with the police on duty at the exile’s home.
A peacekeeper is killed, Jean-Michel Jamme, 25, and another seriously injured, Bernard Vigna, who will remain nailed to a wheelchair until his death, in 2008. In the haste, the killers also shot dead Yvonne Stein, 45, the next-door neighbor of the former head of the Iranian government, and injured her sister. Protected by his armored door, Chapour Bakhtiar escaped the attack unscathed. He died eleven years later, in Suresnes, under the stab wounds of another emissary from Tehran.
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