A 2006 Guardian interview with Iran’s slain security chief now reads as a grim warning of the conflict that killed him
Deep down, Ali Larijani always believed that the western powers were bent on destroying Iran’s revolutionary regime, for which he had fought on the battlefield.
The prescience of that inner conviction has now been vindicated in lethal fashion as Larijani has become the latest establishment figure to die at the hands of Israel, killed in an apparently targeted airstrike, according to reports.
It came frothing to the surface when the Guardian interviewed him in June 2006, when he was in the thick of tense and protracted cat-and-mouse negotiations with the west over Iran’s nuclear programme.
As secretary of the supreme national security council – the same position he held at the time of his death – Larijani, a former Revolutionary Guards commander, was the point man in a dispute that had seemed to have risen to existential levels for the regime which he served and its arch enemy Israel.
