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Hassan Abdulrahman is Wanted in America, But He's a Bigshot in Iranian TV
By Pete Kotz in fugitives, homicide
Tuesday, Oct. 20 2009 @ 10:01AM
Hassan-Abdulrahman.jpg
Hassan Abdulrahman admits to being the hit man in the 1980 murder of an Iranian diplomat
​Hassan Abdulrahman admits that in 1980, he murdered Ali Akbar Tabatabai by shooting him three times in the stomach at his Maryland home. Tabatabai was the former press attache for the Shah of Iran at that country's Washington Embassy. Abdulrahman was the American-born assassin Iran's new government paid $5,000 to kill him.

Abdulrahman, who was born David Theodore Belfield before converting to Islam in 1969, first fled to Canada, then to Tehran. He's never denied that he was the hit man in the case. "I don't regret that, no," he told Times Online. But while he remains a fugitive from U.S. justice, it appears he's become a bigshot in Iranian TV...

According to a former colleague, Abdulrahman is an editor for Press TV, an English-language flagship station run by the Iranian government. (Think fundamentalist version of CNN, only run by religious nuts.) The colleague, who doesn't want his name used, quit over the network's coverage of the recent Iranian presidential elections, which were more rigged than an Atlantic City school board vote.

He says Abdulrahman readily admitted to killing the diplomat, and showed no remorse. And when your boss is a confessed hit man, he probably doesn't carry a whole lot of credibility in the newsroom.

"Knowing that a person wanted by the FBI for murder was influencing the editorial line of the network and choosing the stories people around the world would watch didn't seem right to me," says the former colleague.

But since Iran doesn't have an extradition treaty with the U.S., there's nothing the FBI can do about Abdulrahman.