TEHRAN: Iran's first president after the 1979 Islamic revolution, Abolhassan Banisadr, died in a Paris hospital on Saturday aged 88, after decades of exile in France following his dismissal by parliament.
"After a long illness, Abolhassan Banisadr died on Saturday at the (Pitie-) Salpetriere hospital" in southeast Paris, official IRNA news agency said, citing a source close to the former president.
His family in France confirmed his death.
"We would like to inform the honourable people of Iran and all the activists of independence and freedom that... Abolhassan Banisadr has passed away... after a long struggle with illness," they said in a statement.
The family statement hailed Banisadr as someone who "defended freedoms".
But he was slammed by Iran's judiciary. "All these years, under the shadow of French and Western intelligence, he did not miss a beat to defame the people and the system of the Islamic republic," said a statement published on its Mizan Online website.Banisadr won Iran's first free election in 1980 to become president hot on the heels of the previous year's Islamic revolution.
But he was dismissed by the Iranian parliament in 1981 as his relations with late supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini deteriorated. Since then, he had been living in exile in France. Born on March 22, 1933 in a village near Hamadan in western Iran, Banisadr was a supporter of liberal Islam. A practising Muslim, at the age of 17 he became active in the ranks of the National Front of Iran, the movement of nationalist leader Mohammad Mossadegh.
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