Fada'iyan-e Islam

Fadayan-e Islam (Persian: فدائیانِ اسلام; English; "Fedayeen of Islam" or "Self-Redeemers of Islam") is a Shia fundamentalist group in Iran with a strong activist political and terrorist orientation. The group was founded in 1946, and registered as a political party in 1989. It was founded by a theology student, Navvab Safavi. Safavi sought to purify Islam in Iran by ridding it of 'corrupting individuals' by means of carefully planned assassinations of certain leading intellectual and political figures. The group executed a series of assassinations (author Ahmad Kasravi, court minister (and former prime minister) Abdolhossein Hazhir, the Prime Minister Haj Ali Razmara, the former education minister Abdul Hamid Zangeneh) and attempted assassinations (the Shah of Iran, and foreign minister Hossein Fatemi) and succeeded in saving some of its assassins from punishment with the help of the group's powerful clerical supporters. Eventually the group was suppressed and Safavi was executed by the Iranian government in the mid-1950s. The group survived as supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution.