On Monday, the Iranian judiciary announced that a gardener who worked for Iranian director Dariush Mehrjoi was the one who stabbed the director and his wife to death with a knife on October 15, due to financial disputes.
The head of the judiciary in Alborz Province near Tehran, Hossein Fazeli Harikendi, said, “The main suspect was a gardener in Mehrjoi’s villa and he was angry with him for financial reasons.”
He added that the director owed 300 million riyals (about $635) to his former employee.
The contributor to the fame of Iranian cinema around the world and the director of the 1969 film “The Cow” was killed at the age of 83 on Saturday evening, along with his wife, Wahida Mohammadifar, a 54-year-old screenwriter, inside their home in Karaj, west of the Iranian capital.
In total, four people are involved in this murder. They entered the villa before the gardener beat Harjouji and stabbed him in the neck while the director was watching television. His wife was killed in her bedroom, according to the judiciary.
Interior Minister Ahmed Wahidi ruled out the existence of any “link between the killing of Mehrajoi and a series of assassinations” of opposition intellectuals in November 1998 committed by the country’s secret police.
