When Hasan Ali Mansour (Prime Minister) was assassinated on January 21, 1965, he had been the main suspect wanted by SAVAK for years. SAVAK had several photos of this person with different clothes and a number of names such as Dr. Javadi, Dr. Esfahani, Dr. Hoseyni and Shaykh Abbas Tehrani. The security organization had offered a reward for catching him dead or alive, and Mohammad-Reza had personally ordered his arrest. SAVAK had chosen the name “Sarfaraz” for him considering him to be a moving archive whose arrest would give the regime much information regarding the combatant and opposition groups. This Muslim guerrilla was Sayyed Ali Andarzgo.
Andarzgo was born in 1939 in the Bazarcheh Gomrok neighbourhood located in Shoush Square. After completing his elementary education at Farrokhi Elementary School, he started working as a carpenter in Charso Bozorg, Tehran at the age of twelve. Along with his daily work, Ali Andarzgo used to study religious books at night.
Andarzgo met Sadeq Amani when he was a teenager and used to attend his weekly meetings held in Lurzadeh Street.
Andarzgo started an open struggle against the regime of Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi in 1962, at the same time as the beginning of Imam Khomeini’s movement, and he was arrested and sent to prison after the uprising on June 5, 1963.
After being released from prison, Andarzgo together with Sadeq Amani, Mohammad-Ebrahim Iraqi, Mohammad Bokharaei, Reza Saffar-Harandi and Mortaza Niknejad, decided to initiate an armed struggle against the Shah. Therefore, after getting weapons and explosives, they gradually engaged in military exercises.
Hasan Ali Mansour, the Shah’s Prime Minister who revived the Capitulation Law, sent Imam Khomeini (ra) into exile in Turkey on November 4, 1964, because of disclosing the regime’s plots and corruption.
To counter this action of the Pahlavi regime, Andarzgo and his friends in the Islamic Coalition Party decided to assassinate Hasan Ali Mansour.
In this operation, Andarzgo acted as a supporting element who would get engaged if Mohammad Bokharaie fails to complete the operation. After the assassination of Mansour, Andarzgo escaped and went to Qom and changed his name to Shaykh Abbas Tehrani. Four of Andarzgo’s associates were executed after the trial on June 16, 1965, and also, he was sentenced to death in absentia. After this operation, SAVAK mobilized all its forces to arrest Andarzgo and spread his photo in all its centres. Andarzgo continued his activities against the Pahlavi regime by using different names and disgusting himself. He had prepared 23 birth certificates and passports and could hide himself from the SAVAK agents. Andarzgo went to Afghanistan, Syria and Lebanon for a while and met Imam Khomeini (ra) once in Najaf, and after returning to Iran went to Mashhad. Finally, on July 24, 1987, by eavesdropping on his telephone conversations SAVAK was able to track him and hence he was arrested near Zhaleh Square, Saqabashi Street. When encountering agents of the Anti-Sabotage Joint Committee, Andarzgo did not have a weapon yet he pretended to have one in order not to fall into their hands alive. Even though the regime agents were ordered to capture him alive, they started shooting him. After his martyrdom and during the medical examination after death, sixteen bullets were removed from his body.
By secretly burying Andarzgo’s body in Behesht-e Zahra, SAVAK breathed a sigh of relief after thirteen years of chasing him, but five months later, with the victory of the Islamic Revolution, the life of this dreaded security organization also came to an end.
Reference: The Encyclopedia of the Islamic Revolution
Archive of The History of the Islamic Revolution
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