A group of unknown offenders have killed an Iranian Kurdish political activist Behrouz (Rebin) Rahimi, in Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan Region of Iraq, on 14 July.

A CCTV footage published from the moment of the incident shows that a group of people followed Rahimi by a BMW car with tinted glass and no license plate and shot him with pistol-type guns equipped with silencers.

The activist’s wife, Zoleykha Nasseri, told the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) that some workers found Rahimi unconscious an hour and a half after a bullet hit him in the back in Zhaleh neighbourhood in the suburbs of Sulaymaniyah, near his workplace.

Rahimi lost his life in Sulaymaniyah hospital due to severe bleeding, she said.

The political activist’s body was returned to his family after an autopsy in the forensic medicine department of Sulaymaniyah, where he was buried.

Behrouz (Rebin) Rahimi, born in 1973 in Sanandaj, began his political and civic activities in Sanandaj in 2007. Pressures from security agencies forced him to leave Iran in 2012.

He and his wife registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Erbil and were recognised as political asylum seekers in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

The activist’s wife said security agencies of the Islamic Republic of Iran “continuously threatened us” during their time in the Kurdistan region. She added that they had received threatening messages on social media in the past few months.

“Several CCTV cameras at my husband’s workplace recorded the offenders. Security forces of the Kurdistan Region [of Iraq] are obliged to act responsibly as soon as possible to find the offenders”, she continued.

In the past few years, members of foreign teams of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) killed several Kurdish political activists living in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Eghbal Moradi, a Kurdish political activist and the father of the executed political prisoner Zanyar Moradi, is one of those killed by unknown individuals on 17 July 2018 in the border town of Panjwen in the Kurdistan Region. Before that, forces of the Ministry of Intelligence had carried out another assassination attempt against him in Kurdistan.