Iranian Kurdish opposition group claims Tehran-aligned assassins killed senior party member
Mousa Babakhani was kidnapped Thursday and his body was found Saturday, with signs that he was tortured
An Iranian-Kurdish opposition group, now based in neighboring Iraq accused Tehran-aligned assassins of killing one of its party's leaders.
Mousa Babakhani, a member of the central committee of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), was "assassinated by a terrorist affiliated" with Iran, a statement from the party said, reported AFP.
The politician was reportedly kidnapped Thursday and his body was found on Saturday at the Guli Sulaimani hotel in Erbil, the Kurdistan region capital. Reports suggested that his corpse bore "marks of torture."
Kurdish security forces have said they are investigating his death.
The KDPI, which was banned after Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, has accused Iran of murdering several of its leaders in recent years.
In September 2018, an Iranian missile strike on the KDPI headquarters in Iraq's Kurdish region killed 15 people.
In July 2019, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said they had attacked suspected "terrorists" in Iraqi Kurdistan, killing and wounding several.
Kurds, a non-Arab ethnic group, have long agitated for their own state. They number between 25 million and 35 million people, spread across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran and are by far the largest indigenous group in the world without their own nation.
In Iran, they make up around 10 percent of the population.
