Explosion at the Prime Minister's Office and the Assassination of Rajai and Bahonar

On the afternoon of Sunday, August 30, 1981 (8th of Shahrivar 1360), around three o'clock, a meeting of the Supreme Defense Council was underway at the Prime Minister's Office on Pasteur Street in Tehran. President Mohammad-Ali Rajai and Prime Minister Mohammad-Javad Bahonar, along with several military and government officials, were seated together when a powerful bomb hidden inside a briefcase suddenly detonated. President Rajai, Prime Minister Bahonar, and Colonel Houshang Vahid-Dastjerdi, Chief of the National Police of the Islamic Republic, were killed instantly. Abdul-Hossein Daftarian, Director General of Financial and Administrative Affairs at the Prime Minister's Office, suffocated in an elevator, and a woman passing by outside the building was also killed.

By midnight that day, the death toll reached eight, with 23 others wounded. The perpetrator was identified as Masoud Keshmiri, an operative of the People's Mujahedin Organization of Iran (MEK) who had infiltrated the Prime Minister's Office and had also been involved in the bombing of the Islamic Republic Party headquarters weeks earlier.

These two consecutive events, occurring within a single month, deprived Iran of two presidents and a prime minister, marking one of the darkest security chapters in the early years of the Islamic Republic. In commemoration of this event, the 8th of Shahrivar was officially designated as "National Anti-Terrorism Day," and the period from August 24 to 30 (2nd to 8th of Shahrivar) was named "Government Week."