Sadeq Khalkhali

摘要

Three months after Iran's 1979 revolution, a farmer's lad found himself trying the shah's longest-serving prime minister. The defendant was Amir Abbas Hoveida, a patrician courtier whose ex-wife was famous for sending him, every morning, a fresh orchid for his buttonhole. The parvenu was a plump mullah, pasty-faced and delighted by his new nickname, "Executioner Khalkhali". As revolutions go, Iran's was not particularly bloody; the swift assumption of power by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini saw to that. But the quarrelsome revolutionaries wanted revenge on the shah's dictatorship, the only policy they could agree on. As Khomeini's first appointee to be judge, Sadeq Khalkhali was a champion of retributive justice. In the laying low of Hoveida, Mr Khalkhali also saw a chance to radicalise the revolution.