Hamid Reza Chitgar

According to a close source, a man named Ali Amiztab corresponded with Chitgar from Iran a couple of years before his murder and established a regular contact with him. In his letters, he wrote about establishing a group of sympathizers of the Labor Party in Iran. Finally, he asked to meet Chitgar in person and set up a meeting in Vienna, Austria. Chitgar who never traveled alone and did not trust his interlocutor tried to find friends to travel with him. For various reasons, no one was available and Chitgar decided to go alone. On 19 May 1987, he traveled to Vienna to meet with this man.

The assassination was widely reported in the local press and caused a wave of protests by Iranian and European political groups. Hamid Reza Chitgar's body was buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris on 8 August 1987.

He returned in Iran and was politically active during and after the revolution. He was once arrested by the Revolutionary Guards in March 1981 for the publications of his publishing house (which published political and non-political materials). He was taken to the Evin prison and soon taken back to his printing house in order to lure other political activists. He was able to escape and lived underground for 6 months before fleeing to France in 1983 where he obtained political asylum.

Hamid Reza Chitgar (7 July 1949 – 19 May 1987, also known as Hamid Bahmani) was an exiled Iranian communist politician who lived in France after the Iranian Revolution and was assassinated in Austria by the Iranian government.

Hamid Reza Chitgar was born in the town of Babol in the Mazandaran province of Iran in 1949. After finishing his engineering studies in Tehran, he pursued his master's in Strasbourg, France in the mid 1970s.