Sadegh Tabatabayi, who was deputy to Mehdi Bazargan, Iran’s first prime minister after the 1979 Revolution, and who also known as the author of the Referendum for the establishment of the Islamic Republic, has passed away at the age of 71 in Germany.
Tabatabayi was a student activist in Germany before the 1979 Revolution and accompanied future Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini when he arrived in Tehran in February of 1979. After the Revolution, Tabatabayi served in several ministries as deputy and advisor and in the office of prime ministers Mehdi Bazargan and Mohammad Ali Rejai. After Bazargan’s resignation, Tabatabayi served as interim prime minister by order of Ayatollah Khomeini.
With the establishment of the presidency, he made an attempt to become president but did not succeed.
During the Iran-Iraq War, he was briefly arrested in Germany for links to an opium trafficking case. After that, he vanished from the political scene and became a low-key critic of the Iranian regime while living in Germany.
