[Reader-list] More controversy on Kandahar

[abir bazaz]

International Herald Tribune
Saturday,January 5,2002

An actor in the movie "Kandahar" is also an assassin who killed an Iranian dissident in suburban Washington in 1980 and then fled to Iran, an American prosecutor says. Hassan Tantai, who plays a black American doctor in the film, is actually the 51-year-old Daoud Salahuddin, born David Belfield, said Douglas Gansler, state's attorney for Montgomery County, Maryland. "We are very confident that they are one in the same," Gansler said. "He's a terrorist, he's a fugitive and he's a confessed assassin." "Kandahar," a suddenly timely story of the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan, has been shown worldwide and has won several film festival awards. Directed by the Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf and filmed in Iran near the Afghan border, "Kandahar" is the story of an Afghan journalist living in Canada who travels to Afghanistan to find her sister. Along the way she meets Tantai, playing the role of an American-born doctor treating Afghan women. Gansler said he had "conclusive" information that proves Tantai is Salahuddin, but would not comment further because the case is still technically open. There is no statute of limitations on first-degree murder, he said. Prosecutors say Salahuddin, who converted to Islam as a young man, killed the former Iranian diplomat Ali Akbar Tabatabai in July 1980, then escaped to Iran and shelter under the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Tabatabai, the former press attaché for the Iranian Embassy in Washington, had been an opponent of Khomeini. In a 1995 interview with The Washington Post and ABC News in Turkey, he said he was contacted by Iranian agents shortly after Khomeini's Islamic revolution toppled the shah in 1979 and asked whether he would kill Tabatabai. He agreed in return for $4,000 and a promise that he would be sent to China for medical training. Makhmalbaf said he chose his actors from "crowded streets and barren deserts"' and did not know whether Salahuddin and Tantai were the same person. "I never ask those wh
before, nor do I follow what they do after I finish shooting my film. 'Kandahar' is no exception," he said in a statement.