A Jewish man who was in a romantic relationship with the daughter of a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard was murdered in his Tehran apartment last week.
The Jewish community suspects the woman of complicity in the killing of Daniel Mahgerefteh, 24, who belonged to one of Iran’s wealthier Jewish families, Israel’s Channel 2 News reported on Wednesday night.
According to Armin Avi Kreuznacher, an Iranian-born Jew who emigrated from the country in 2010, Mahgerefteh was killed by the woman’s family after the two had intimate relations and he refused to marry her.
“The murder was carried out as revenge for dishonoring the family,” said Kreuznacher, who currently resides in Germany .
Police investigators reportedly told the woman that she had “done a good deed.”
However, Iranian authorities maintained that Mahgerefteh was killed during a robbery. According to the official account, the killer, who was acquainted with Mahgerefteh, came to his apartment armed with a gun and shot his host in the back.
He then stole his car, eventually parking it on one of Tehran’s streets and hiding from the authorities.
Police reportedly apprehended the alleged murderer, who confessed to the deed.
Menashe Amir, an expert on Iran’s Jewish community, told The Times of Israel that the official account of Mahgerefteh’s murder was rife with inconsistencies.
In November, a 57-year-old Jewish woman was brutally stabbed to death, her body mutilated by Muslim attackers, in the Iranian city of Isfahan. The woman’s family said it was a religiously motivated crime with a property dispute as its pretext.
Tuba N., whose family requested that her last name not be revealed for fear of further attacks, was murdered by her Muslim neighbors, who had harassed her family for years in an attempt to drive them from their home and confiscate the property for an adjoining mosque.
“The religious radicals even expropriated part of the house and attached it to the mosque’s courtyard,” Amir said. “The Jewish family appealed to the courts with the help of a local attorney” to seek redress for the conflict, “despite the threats to their lives.”
A government census published earlier this year indicated there were a 8,756 Jews left in Iran, about a tenth of the country’s Jewish population at the time of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.