Former president of Iran Abolhassan Banisadr. Image source: Wikimedia

i24 News – Abolhassan Banisadr, who became Iran’s first president after the 1979 Islamic revolution before fleeing into exile in France, died on Saturday aged 88.

He died at the Pitie-Salpetriere hospital in Paris following a long illness, his wife and children said on Banisadr’s official website.

Banisadr emerged from obscurity to become Iran’s first president in January 1980 with the help of the Islamic clergy.

But after a power struggle with radical clerics he fled the following year to France, where he spent the rest of his life.

His family said on his website that Banisadr had “defended freedom in the face of new tyranny and oppression in the name of religion.”

In 2019, the former president said that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had betrayed the principles of the revolution after sweeping to power in 1979, adding this had left a “very bitter” taste among some of those who had returned with him to Tehran in triumph.

Banisadr recalled then how 40 years earlier in Paris, he had been convinced that the religious leader’s Islamic revolution would pave the way for democracy and human rights after the rule of the Shah.