MIDDLE EAST: The Dangerous Mosque

Teheran’s Mosque of the Shah is getting to be no refuge for Premiers of Iran. In 1951, Premier Ali Razmara, one of Iran’s ablest men, was assassinated there by a member of the fanatic Fadayan Islam (Crusaders of Islam). Last week 72-year-old Hussein Ala, the ablest of Razmara’s successors as Premier, arrived at the mosque for a memorial service. Entering, he shucked his shoes, started across the carpeted floor. He was stopped by a thinly bearded man who drew a revolver and shouted: “Why are there so many prostitutes in the city?” The bearded man fired a single shot, but one of Ala’s bodyguards, with quick presence of mind, jolted his arm just in time, and the shot went wide. As the assailant grappled with the bodyguards, he managed to get one hand free, and to hit Ala on the back of the head with the revolver before he was dragged away.

At the police station the assailant, 32-year-old Muzaffar Ali Zolgadr, feigned insanity in an effort to conceal the fact that he actually was an assassin on assignment. But on his undershirt, cops found two messages written in red ink: “The military pact and oil agreement must be abrogated and all Moslem rules enforced. Islam is above all.” The second was from the Koran: “Those who get killed for God and for His rules are not dead but alive.”

Confronted, Zolgadr at last confessed that he had received orders from Fadayan Islam to kill Ala “because he was treading in the path of treason.”

As for Ala, he was taken to a nearby hospital to have his minor head injury treated. Unshaken, he told a TIME correspondent: “Write your magazine that our enemy’s attempt to change the situation has failed, and I will be going to Bagdad tomorrow,” for the first meeting of the “northern-tier” powers, who are joined in a mutual-defense pact against Communism.